Marketplaces or Your Own Website: When to Invest in Your Domain and How to Measure It with Semalt

Many Catalan product brands have grown in recent years on the back of marketplaces. It is a reasonable decision: volume arrives sooner and without building your own traffic. The problem appears when that channel represents eighty per cent of revenue, commissions rise, and the brand discovers it has no direct relationship with its customers.

This article does not argue for abandoning marketplaces. It explains how to decide, with data, which part of the effort is worth moving to your own domain and in what order.

The calculation almost nobody runs

Before talking about rankings it helps to put the numbers on the table. A marketplace sale leaves commission, imposed logistics costs and zero customer data. An own-site sale leaves acquisition cost, your own logistics cost, and a customer you can sell to again.

The relevant comparison is not “which sells more”, but what the second purchase is worth. In high-repeat categories - cosmetics, food, consumables, accessories - the own site pays back quickly because the second sale carries no intermediation. In single-purchase, low-ticket categories, the maths favours the marketplace for much longer.

First battle: your own brand

The usual surprise when analysing a brand selling through platforms is this: when somebody searches its name, the first results are not theirs. They are marketplace listings, price comparison sites, resellers and sometimes competitors bidding on that name.

It is the worst possible way to lose margin, because this is demand the brand itself generated. The check takes five minutes: enter the domain and the brand queries into rank tracking and see who actually owns those results.

Second layer: the queries the platform cannot answer

Competing with a marketplace on the generic category query is, in most cases, burning budget. Where you do win is the ground where a standardised listing falls short.

• Compatibility and fit: “which spare part fits model X”, “does this piece fit…”.
• Use and maintenance: how to clean it, how long it lasts, how to install it, what to do when it fails.
• Comparison between your own references: which of your three models suits which case.
• Regulation and requirements: certifications, approvals, shipping restrictions.

These are modest-volume, very high-intent queries, and they also build the topical authority that later helps on commercial queries. It is the long road, but it is the only one that depends on nobody else.

Third layer: generative answers

When somebody asks an assistant which brand to buy in a category, the answer names some brands and some sources. Platforms have no automatic advantage there: what gets cited is whoever publishes verifiable, structured information.

The AI visibility module lets you check, for any domain, which queries it appears in, which pages get cited and which brands are named instead. In product categories we see a clear pattern: pages with complete technical data and buying guides get cited, brand manifesto pages do not.

Logistics and returns: the part that decides the second purchase

On a brand site, the content that most influences conversion is not always descriptive: it is the conditions. Real delivery times by area, shipping cost shown before checkout, a return policy written without ambiguity, and exactly what happens if the product arrives faulty.

The platform resolves that uncertainty by default - it is its main argument against brand sites - so if your site does not resolve it better or at least as well, the customer returns to the channel where they already know what to expect. It is also information automated answers cite frequently, because it is concrete and verifiable.

One measurement worth more than traffic

For a brand reducing platform dependency, the metric that matters is not organic sessions: it is the share of revenue arriving through the direct channel, measured quarterly. Traffic can double while the mix stays identical. The channel mix is the number that tells you whether the strategy is working, and it is the one worth putting on the first slide.

A realistic twelve-month plan

The data marketplaces do not give you and your site does

Beyond margin, the structural difference between the two channels is information. The platform tells you what sold; your website tells you what people were looking for before buying, which questions they asked and which pages they visited without buying.

That information carries operational value that often surprises product teams. The queries bringing traffic reveal use cases that were not in the commercial plan, incompatibilities that generate returns, and recurring doubts that can be resolved on the product page itself. In several projects the most profitable change of the year was not a ranking one: it was rewriting sizing or compatibility information after seeing, in search data, what people actually asked before buying.

It is also the information that lets you decide which references deserve their own content and which do not. Without it, catalogue decisions get made looking only at platform sales history, which is biased by what the platform chooses to show.

Reviews, comparison sites and owning the conversation

When somebody already knows your brand, the typical search is not the bare name: it is the name plus “reviews”, “returns”, “warranty” or a competitor's name. In most Spanish product brands those queries are currently held by comparison sites, forums and review aggregators.

You cannot win them all, nor should you try. What is worth having is your own honest, verifiable page for the three or four highest-volume queries in that family: return conditions explained without small print, warranty with concrete timeframes, and a comparison between your own references.

Verification is simple: enter those queries into rank tracking and see who owns them today. In most cases the brand does not appear on the first page of its own conversation, and reclaiming even part of that ground has a direct effect on conversion, because these are users already in the decision.

Expensive mistakes when building the brand site

Copying marketplace descriptions

If your page text is identical to what appears on three platforms, the engine has little reason to prefer your domain. Your own description must add what the platform does not allow: technical detail, usage context, real customer questions.

Worse prices than on the platform

If the customer compares and your site is more expensive, you are training them to buy where you pay commission. Even if you cannot cut the price, you can offer what the platform forbids: extended warranty, free shipping, an accessory, direct support.

Product pages without clear stock or availability

Uncertainty about availability is the most frequent abandonment reason on brand sites. If the data exists in the system, it has to be visible on the page.

Not measuring brand and category separately

Mixing both families in one report hides what matters. Brand queries measure whether you are reclaiming your own ground; category queries, whether you are gaining new ground. Different objectives, different timescales.

What to do about listings duplicated across channels

When the same product lives on your site and on three platforms, identical descriptions everywhere are not directly penalised, but they leave you without an argument: the engine has no reason to prefer your domain. The fix is not rewriting everything, but adding to your page what the platform does not allow: full measurements, materials, compatibility, maintenance instructions and real customer questions with their answers.

The order that works when resources are limited

Most brands cannot do everything at once. The order that returns fastest is: first the pages for your best-selling references, because brand demand already exists there; then the compatibility and usage guides, because they attract links and build topical authority; and only then the category pages, which are the hardest ground and the one where the platform is strongest. Reversing that order is the most common way to spend a year without moving anything.

When to accelerate with a campaign

Product pages and technical content are best written by whoever knows the product. What a brand coming from platforms usually lacks is domain authority, because it never needed to build any. That is where managed campaigns fit: AutoSEO at $149 a month, with AI keyword selection and daily link building from a network of over 230,000 partner sites, or FullSEO from $500 a month with a dedicated team and manual donor approval. Conditions are on the pricing page.

A simple calculation for setting the budget

Before investing in your own domain, put one figure on the table: how much you pay in commissions per year. That amount is the rational ceiling for what it makes sense to invest in reducing dependency, and in most brands it is a number that surprises people the first time it is calculated.

The second figure is the share of sales arriving today through the direct channel. Below twenty per cent, the improvement headroom is enormous and almost any reasonable investment pays back. Above sixty, the work is largely done and the focus should shift to repeat purchase rather than acquisition.

With those two figures the decision stops being a matter of opinion and becomes arithmetic: what it costs to win one point of direct channel versus what that point is worth in unpaid commissions and owned customers.

Frequently asked questions