Making
the decision to start your own business is a big brave step that you
should be really proud of. Being your own boss comes with a lot of
rewards but also a lot of responsibility and challenges that you
didn’t have to face before. One of the first challenges is deciding
where do you want to start selling the products. If you were to open
a brick-and-mortar shop you would select your location painstakingly,
considering all the different drawbacks and upsides of each property.
Similarly, when you intend to sell online, you have some things to
consider before jumping headfirst into opening a business account.

Selling
sex toys is probably one of the most fun industries you could have
chosen to go into, but it does come with its own set of difficulties
when it comes to choosing your selling platform.

In
this blog post we will break down the pros and cons of opening your
own eCommerce sex toy website – made even easier by our
Shop-in-a-Box website solutions – versus using an online marketplace
such as Amazon or eBay to sell adult products on.

Top
5 Reasons to Open Your Own eCommerce Website

1. Branding

You can put a lot of effort into branding and create a unique, personal shopping experience for your customers. You can build a brand profile, set out a brand message and communicate your brand identity via your website’s colours, fonts, banners, contents and so forth. This is a level of freedom and control that you will never have on a marketplace. Branding can help you stand out from your competition and you can even gain returning customers who will recognise your shop and chose to order their monthly lube supply from you.

2. Marketing
and Social Media

You
can use social media to drive traffic to your site by posting about
products, offers or anything else going on with your business. Social
media is an incredibly powerful tool in any company’s arsenal, and
it can help you establish a distinct brand voice that will attract
the kind of demographic that you want to target with your site. On a
marketplace you might end up being the hundredth person selling the
same lubricant with the same main image and with only pennies
separating you in price. As a result, you have much less control over
getting customers to pick you to buy from.

3. Customisation

When you have control over your website, unlike on marketplaces, you can customise the features you offer to your customers. Want to set up a reward point scheme? There’s an extension for that! Need help with fraud protection? No problem! Decided to accept bitcoins? Just search for the right plugin. You can determine what option you want to add to your website so you can stay ahead of your competition or offer something unique that will set you apart. In comparison, on a marketplace your options are limited and depend on the marketplace’s terms, conditions and policies – and adult products are often not accepted for special promotions and sales.

4. Customer
service

While
this might actually seem like a drawback seeing that customer service
takes time and effort, being able to provide customer service
directly to your customers is a great opportunity to build rapport
and loyalty. With the right extension, you can automatically email
discount codes to customers who have abandoned carts on your site or
offer them a price match option so they can feel savvy and save a
pound or two when they spend on your site instead of a competitor’s.

5. Analytics

If you build/run your own website, you will get access to powerful analytics and reports about your customers’ behaviour and the sales funnel they go through. This will also allow you to build a database of your customers and even target them with newsletters based on their demographic makeup. You can also track your conversion rate and see where people are dropping off when they are browsing on your site so you can figure out what to improve, how to drive more sales. On a marketplace you don’t have access to much information about your customers and there aren’t many tools, other than price, that you can use to drive sales to your listings.

…
and the 4 Reasons Why You Might
Think Twice

1. Cost &
Time

Developing
a well-functioning and appealing website takes time and unless you
are a web-developer yourself, the cost can run high. This means that
you might end up shelling out money in the beginning of your journey
as a sex toy retailer, without any return in sight. In comparison,
you can set up on eBay (pending approval by the marketplace, but more
on that later) in a couple of hours and theoretically make your first
sale the same day.

2. Content
Creation & SEO

Once your
website is up and running, the hard work only just starts. You will
need to drive traffic to your site and the best way to do that is by
creating unique content. You will probably have to go through your
entire catalogue and re-write your product descriptions to avoid
publishing duplicate content that can harm your search engine
ranking. You will want to create buying guides, blog posts and any
other original content you can think of to make sure your website
appears higher on Google than your competitors’. It’s a
time-consuming task that is not at all needed on marketplaces.

3. Less
Support, More Responsibility

Whether
you are setting up with a wholesale or a dropship model, you will
have to take care of your own customer service which means answering
product questions, smoothing out delivery/courier issues and even
taking the occasional prank call that tend to multiply during school
holidays. If anything goes wrong on your site, you’ll either rely
on others to sort it out which might lead to downtime or you’ll
need to figure it out yourself – an often frustrating task. All of
this means that the buck stops with you and that sort of
responsibility is not appealing to everyone.

4. Domain Name

Your
domain name will stay with you for a long time and will largely
determine how you present yourself to your potential customers.
‘FilthySmut.com’ will attract a very different audience than
‘SensualSilk.com’ will. But you don’t just determine a large
part of your brand identity with your domain name – unfortunately
you also have to make sure that it’s not taken already which can
throw a massive wrench in your preconceived ideas about your company
image.

Top
5 Reasons to Sell on a Marketplace

1. Small or No
Investment

Setting
up and starting to sell on a marketplace like eBay or Amazon can cost
next to nothing. If you use a dropshipping service, you won’t have
to order in and store stock yourself and you won’t have to own
packaging materials or have an account with couriers to be able to
ship your orders. You cut the cost of the website, storage and
logistics, all of which would weigh heavily on your start-up
budgeting.

2. Simplified
Selling

Marketplaces
streamline the experience of both buying and selling on their
platforms so you can easily find items you want to buy and similarly
easily list things you want to sell. With eBay and Amazon, you can
just copy in product information to relevant fields, write a quick
product description, upload pictures and set a price and you are
already on your way. Of course, you can spend extra time on your
listings and storefront to make them more appealing, and you will
have to spend time on researching and price matching with your
competitors to make sure buyers click on your listing and not on
someone else’s.

3. Buyers
Already Trust the Platform

When
your site is fresh out of the box, you might have to work extra hard
to establish trust with your potential customers – they will want
to use certain type of payment methods, they will want to see a
generous returns policy and they will probably want to make sure that
your delivery and invoicing will be discreet. In comparison,
customers know that they can expect all of this on a marketplace, so
they purchase with a lot more confidence. This is especially true
thanks to the feedback system that lets buyers rate sellers on
everything from shipping to customer service.

4. No Marketing
Needed

People
are already flocking to marketplaces due to slashed prices,
convenience and pre-established trust (see above) so you already have
a massive pool of potential customers that you can fish from. You
don’t need to advertise yourself or make yourself stand out in any
way, you just need to get the price right or find a less saturated
niche to sell. People shop on marketplaces to find bargains, they
don’t usually browse to find a specific shop or seller.

5. No Security
& Payment Issues

If
you decide to sell on a marketplace, you won’t have to worry about
fraudulent payments, chargebacks, GDPR or payment gateway integration
– these are all taken care of for you by the marketplace itself.
Instead of writing long terms and conditions, researching consumer
laws and privacy legislations, these are all largely pre-determined
by the platform. Similarly, instead of trying to integrate a variety
of payment options to your website, you can just use whatever payment
method the marketplace itself supports.

… and
5 Reasons Why You Might Choose a Shop-in-a-Box Instead

1. Competition

Marketplaces are cutthroat when it comes to competition and it always comes down to pricing. Since there are not a lot of ways a seller can make their listings stand out, dropping the price and becoming the cheapest on any particular product is still the most reliable way to rake in some sales. However, this leads to uncertain conversion rates and dwindling margins, so you might end up working for pennies per listing, which is not what most people have in mind when they start their own business.

2. No
Opportunity to Brand

Even
though you can spice up your parcels with custom packing slips and
you can personalise your storefront to an extent, most people will
refer to anything they bought from eBay as just that: ‘got it off
of eBay’ and not ‘bought it from kinkyseller123’. This means
that you can spend a year building your business on a marketplace,
without getting any closer to be the next Lovehoney or Ann Summers.

3. Commission

Additionally
to the slashed margins that you might need to put up with, you will
also have to pay commission to the marketplace after each sale.
Combine this with PayPal fees and you are taking another minor hit to
your profits, while, on the other hand, selling on a website means
that the profit is yours to keep – and funnel back to the site
itself.

4. No Agency
Over Customer Retention

There’s
very little chance to build rapport on marketplaces and therefore,
little chance for return business. You can’t build a customer
database with email addresses of people who are definitely interested
in your products and therefore you can’t send newsletters
advertising your newest items, special offers or sales. This, again,
means less interaction with the customer and less chance to stand out
for anything else than your pricing.

5. Approval &
Restrictions

You
can’t start selling sex toys or any adult products on marketplaces
without seeking approval first. Amazon is especially strict about who
is admitted to their select circle of 18+ sellers, but even eBay
requires an application that may take up to 3 weeks to be reviewed.
On top of this, they are also really restrictive about how you list
your adult items – with only a vague definition of “sexually
explicit and overtly sexual content” your listings might get taken
down and your account blocked temporarily, even if you think you
followed all the rules thrown in your way. This leads to loss of
sales, frustration and loss of momentum that can really bring your
eBay listings down.

An Alternative

A
hybrid approach might be the best to aim for – set up a website,
start working on those pesky product descriptions and other SEO tasks
and in the meantime, start making money on the side on marketplaces.
Most eCommerce platforms have extensions available that let you
integrate with the most popular marketplaces so your orders can
appear on your normal eCommerce admin, keeping everything tidy and
organised. Setting up on eBay or Amazon will also give you the
opportunity to familiarise yourself with the industry and get used to
customer enquiries, both of which will be handy once your site is on
the first page of Google and you are swamped with orders!

We
hope this guide will help you make a decision, but, as always, we’d
be really happy to hear from you and read about your experience with
marketplaces and eCommerce sites in the comments section below.
Alternatively, drop us an email or give us a call if you want to
discuss how Net1on1 can help you set up your own business, be that on
eBay or your own shiny new Shop-in-a-Box website.