Custom builds - E-commerce tutorials & guides

A marketplace does not replace your own online store

The number usually arrives dressed as bad news. A statistic in a newsletter, with a small red arrow next to it. A slide at a trade fair, clicked past while the speaker apologizes for the chart. A captioned post explaining that your own online store is over, that commerce now lives on marketplaces and everything else is a hobby with a checkout button. Behind all three of these sits the same figure: 83.4% of global ecommerce spending now flows through marketplaces, up from 81% two years earlier. It is a big number, and it knows it. Most days it is presented as the end of the discussion.

Buy vs build ecommerce app: a practical checklist for merchants

You found a gap in checkout, admin, or fulfillment. By Friday you have three options in the inbox: a monthly app subscription, a freelancer fixed bid, and an agency that wants a discovery workshop first. That fork is the real buy vs build ecommerce app decision – not a philosophy debate. This checklist is meant for one sitting, so you leave the meeting with a default path instead of another week of Slack threads.