Yes, there are people who make a living on Instagram, Facebook or YouTube. Some use Etsy or Facebook to sell so many of their products that it’s profitable. But if your entire business is dependent on a third-party platform or market place, it carries a huge risk: all business may come to an unforeseen stop, if the service provider decides to close your account.
It is not a risk worth taking.
Does You Store Depend on Its Platform?
If you’re entire business is built on, for instance, Facebook or Etsy, then you depend on them.
Let’s say an entrepreneur selling jewelry sets up a page on Facebook, pays for advertising on Facebook and does business only through Facebook. The business is going well for several years; it grows on Facebook and becomes more an more popular – until one day Facebook shuts the page down permanently.
The reason may be, for instance, that other users – or even angry competitors – have reported the page to Facebook and said that the jewelry page contains misleading content. Things may never be resolved with Facebook, and the page with its followers will be lost forever.
And if the entrepreneur wants to continue selling jewelry through Facebook – like he or she successfully did before – he or she will have no other option but to start again from scratch. And now he or she knows, that the same thing can happen again without warning at any time.
Your Page May Be Closed Even If You Don’t Break Any Rules
It is easy to understand that following the rules, even to the T, may not be enough to keep your page or account secure. The social media giants that now act as market places don’t have the time to manually go through every report they receive or even respond to every message they get. Most of such traffic is handled by artificial intelligence and its algorithms. Even if a company acted responsibly on social media, the giant media platform may believe the company is breaking the rules.
An account may be closed for other reasons, too, depending on the platform. If the chosen market place is, for instance, a smaller network that tries to compete with Etsy or eBay, it may suddenly even face bankruptcy, in which case all accounts are naturally closed.
The Best Way: Your Own Online Store
A third-party market place such as Facebook or Etsy may seem inviting, because getting customers through their services may be easier in the beginning.
The most sensible and the most sustainable way to do business online is setting up an online store. Facebook, Instagram, Etsy, YouTube and all other channels should only be used to gain visibility and followers, and any potential clients should always be directed to the company’s privately owned online store. This way, even if something happens on a social media platform and an account is taken down, the company can continue doing business year after year.
Here is another way of thinking about it: if a business is built on one platform only, it can never grow bigger than its host. If all of your business is done through Facebook, you cannot reach any potential clients that are not using Facebook.
Instead, if you have your own online store and use social media to gain visibility and drive traffic, there are no limits to how big your company can grow. You can find the best marketing channels for your store and focus on them without having to limit yourself to just one platform.
Marknad Is a Different Platform
Marknad is also a “platform”, but its principles are different from those of social media giants and market places. It offers its clients the structures for online stores as well as help with building a business around it, but it never limits the communication its customers have with their own customers. It doesn’t even have the means to do that.
And, even if for any reason the customer would want to stop using Marknad as the service provider, all he or she would have to do is set up an online store elsewhere and point the domain to the new store. It would be a relatively straightforward technical process. Everything else – links, social media updates, e-mails with customers, different marketing channels, all followers – would stay the same. The customers might never know a change had been made.
If you use Marknad as the basis for your business, you can be sure that the platform you use to do business with will never be the reason your entire business is taken down.