“Should we sell on Pigu / Amazon / Allegro instead of our own store?” We hear this question every month. The honest answer is “both, but on your terms”, and the details are where retailers lose money.
What marketplaces give you
- Traffic you do not have to buy. Millions of shoppers already searching there, with trust in the platform’s checkout and returns.
- Fast start. Product listings, payments and often delivery are handled for you.
- New markets. Selling in Lithuania or Estonia through a marketplace is easier than launching a localised store from scratch.
What they take
- Margin. Commission plus advertising plus promotions quickly eat 15–30% of the price.
- The customer. You do not get the email, the loyalty or the repeat purchase. The marketplace does.
- Control. Rules change, categories get reshuffled, accounts get suspended for reasons you learn about afterwards.
- Time. Without automation, keeping stock, prices and orders in sync between your store and two marketplaces is a full-time job.
The setup that works
The retailers we see doing well treat marketplaces as an acquisition channel and their own store as the home base:
- One catalogue, many outputs. Products live in your store’s admin. Marketplace feeds (with their category mapping, attribute rules and pricing rules) are generated automatically, per marketplace, on a schedule.
- Orders flow back automatically. Marketplace orders are imported into your store or CRM, confirmed, picked and shipped in the same process as your own orders. Stock is deducted once, in one place.
- Pricing rules per channel. Commission-aware prices on the marketplace, better prices or bundles on your own site, so the customer has a reason to come directly next time.
- Deactivation is monitored. A product that a supplier stopped delivering must disappear from the marketplace before it is sold there. An offer that silently stays live is a refund and a rating hit waiting to happen.
- Insert-in-the-box marketing. Every marketplace parcel is a chance to bring the customer to your own store.
What we build
We have built marketplace integrations for Baltic retailers: automated product feeds with mapping and pricing rules, order import and confirmation on dedicated queues, stock synchronisation and monitoring for offers that should no longer be live. If you sell or plan to sell through marketplaces, let’s talk about the integration before the manual work grows.
