Why should you have your own website?

Your website was always the cornerstone of all your marketing.  For many businesses it still is, but others find just as much success using other people’s platforms, such as online retailers using Ebay or Etsy.  However, there are still a lot of benefits to having a website to call your own.  Mainly, you’re in complete control.  Yes, you will pay a company every year to ‘host’ your website – ie provide you the place on the internet where your website lives – but after that, anything you charge customers through your website comes to you.  You are not paying Amazon fees or giving part of your sales to someone else.

This comes with a caveat though.  If your product is on Amazon, more people will likely find it there than on your own site.  But this comes at the expense of Amazon taking 7-15% as their fee.  I’ve worked with businesses who already sell very successfully through their own website but still upload certain products to Amazon; these are often the ones with the larger profit margins, or where it’s harder to attract customers for this particular product to their own website.

The second place where having your own website puts you in control is what content you can upload to it.  Because you have now got to know your customer, you understand that you may have to give them tailored information.  I have often found a place to stay on Booking.com, but then hopped over to the hotel’s own website to read more about the place before going back onto Booking.com and reserving a room.  Why not just book through the hotel’s website while I’m on it?  Because having been a frequent business traveller I liked to keep all my bookings on one account, where I knew I could find an old invoice if I needed it and gain loyalty points as I went.  But I knew the information that the hotel had put on Booking.com was only a fraction of the information they had – so I would still go looking for their own website and often make decision on what I found there.