Selling on online marketplaces without depending on them

Start with what the marketplace actually gives you, because it is real. It brings buyers who already trust the site. It handles payment collection. Many offer delivery or storage support. For a small seller with no brand and no website traffic, that is hard to build alone. The risk comes from using it without counting the cost or the dependence.

The first discipline is a cost sheet for one order. Pick a product and list everything between the customer's payment and your bank. The product cost and the packaging. The marketplace's fees and any charges for delivery, storage or payment handling, which you should read from your current seller terms and fee schedule, not from memory or from someone else's experience, because they change and differ by category. Discounts you give to stay competitive. Advertising you buy to be seen. The cost of returns. Your own time. And the tax you must handle, which is a matter for your accountant.

Here is a hypothetical example with made-up round numbers. A product sells for Rs 1,000. It costs Rs 500 to buy and pack. Fees and shipping come to Rs 250, and advertising to Rs 100. That leaves Rs 150, or fifteen per cent of the sale price. Now suppose one order in ten is returned and cannot be resold. The average comes down further. These numbers are invented to show the method, not to describe any platform.

Pay particular attention to returns. They are easy to forget when sales are rising. Ask how often items come back, for what reason, who pays for the return shipping and what happens to goods that cannot be sold again. Accurate descriptions and sensible packaging help reduce returns. Consumer-protection rules in India also place duties on sellers who sell through e-commerce platforms, such as describing goods accurately and handling complaints. Read the current rules or ask someone who knows them.

Then look at visibility. On many marketplaces, being seen is partly a matter of paying: for advertising, for promotions, for meeting delivery standards. A new listing may find it difficult to be seen without spending. Decide how much you can afford to spend to stay visible, and what each order must earn to justify it. If you cannot stay visible at a profit, the marketplace is a cost rather than a sales channel.

Now think about account and policy risk. A marketplace is a private business, and its terms are written by it. Accounts and listings can be suspended or removed, sometimes with a limited explanation. Fees, rules and search ranking can change. Payments may be held for a period according to the seller terms. Ask what would happen if you lost access for a month, and whether the business could survive it. If the honest answer is no, that is a sign you are too dependent.

A practical way to measure that is a simple limit. Decide what share of your revenue any one platform may provide, say a third, and review it every quarter. If a single platform provides most of your sales, put in effort and cash to build other routes before you grow further on it.

The next step is to build customers of your own, within the marketplace's rules. Read the seller terms carefully on what you may do with customer contact details and what you may include in a parcel. Do not try to take customers off the platform in ways the rules forbid, because a ban would be the worst result. What you can usually do is build a brand that people can search for by name, make sure your quality brings people back, and offer a simple route for repeat buyers, such as a phone number for orders, a catalogue or a small website. Local and offline sales, such as shops, institutions and your own town, are also routes that no platform controls.

Look at other routes in general terms too. ONDC, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, was set up with government backing to let buyers and sellers transact across different apps instead of inside one company's platform. Whether it suits you depends on your product, your area and the apps available when you look, so check the current position rather than assuming it will replace a marketplace. Your own website, messaging-based catalogues and selling to other businesses are alternatives too, each with its own costs.

Tax is a separate subject, and you should not guess. Selling goods through an e-commerce operator has its own GST treatment, including on registration and on tax collected at source by the operator, and the details have changed over time. Ask your chartered accountant what applies to you now, and keep your records tidy so that the marketplace's statements match your books.

To summarise in a few lines: build a one-order cost sheet from your current fee schedule; count returns, advertising and discounts; set a limit on how much one platform can account for; keep cash in reserve; build direct and local routes alongside; and ask your accountant about tax. A marketplace used this way can be a useful part of the business. Used without these steps, it can quietly become the business, on terms you do not control.