Where to sell
The best way to sell products online for a small business
There are three places to sell online and most advice argues for one of them without saying what you give up. A marketplace brings buyers and takes a commission and the customer relationship. Social selling reaches people where they already are and gives you no control over whether they still see you next year. Your own store gives you the customer, the data and the margin, and gives you no traffic at all on day one.
None of those is the right answer in isolation. The sequence matters more than the choice, and the sequence most small businesses should follow is close to the opposite of what they usually do.
What follows is that sequence, what each channel genuinely costs, and the mistake that wastes the first six months.
What you get
What this gives you
Marketplaces: traffic you rent
Buyers are already there, which is real and valuable. You pay a commission on every sale, compete on price next to identical listings, and the customer belongs to the platform.
Social selling: reach without control
Cheap to start and genuinely effective for visual products. Orders arrive as messages you re-key, and your reach depends on someone else's algorithm.
Your own store: margin and the customer list
No commission, your prices, your customer data, and search authority that accumulates to you. It sells nothing until people know it exists.
The real first customers
People who already buy from you. They are the cheapest orders you will ever get and the reason a new store either works in month one or stalls.
The cost nobody counts
Every channel that does not share stock with your shop creates reconciliation work forever. Two channels is manageable; four is somebody's job.
One catalogue behind all of them
Whatever mix you choose, the products, prices and stock should come from one place. Maintaining a separate catalogue per channel is where small operations quietly drown.
A sequence that works
Start with your own store, even though it has no traffic, and launch it to the customers you already have. This sounds backwards — why build the channel with no audience first? Because the first orders of any new online channel come overwhelmingly from people who already know you, and you would rather those orders arrive somewhere that costs you no commission and tells you who bought.
Then add social as the discovery layer pointing back at it. Share individual products rather than the storefront, because a specific thing is shareable and a shop is not. Treat messages as orders, not as conversations to be transcribed later — that habit is what stops social selling becoming a data-entry job.
Add a marketplace third, and deliberately, for products where the commission is worth the exposure. Marketplaces are excellent at introducing you to buyers who would never have found you, and poor at letting you keep them. Use them for reach on lines that can absorb the fee, not as your only shopfront.
The mistake that wastes six months is doing this in reverse: starting on a marketplace because it has traffic, building a business inside it, and discovering that you have no customer list, no search authority of your own, and margins set by competitors who are also selling nothing but price.
What each channel actually costs
A marketplace costs a percentage of each sale, sometimes a listing fee, and the customer relationship. The last one is the expensive part and the one that does not appear on an invoice: you cannot email a marketplace customer next season, and if you leave the platform you leave without them.
Social costs time and attention rather than fees, and it costs consistency — reach falls away fast when posting stops. It is also the channel most likely to create hidden operational cost, because orders arriving as messages have to be turned into orders by a human, and that human is usually you.
Your own store costs a domain, payment processing and the effort of getting people to it. Traffic is the real price, and it is paid over months rather than as a fee. What you get in exchange is the customer list, the margin and an asset that compounds.
- Marketplace: commission per sale, plus the customer relationship
- Social: time, consistency, and orders that have to be re-keyed by hand
- Own store: domain and processing fees, plus the work of being found
- Every extra channel: reconciliation, unless they share one catalogue and one stock figure
What to sell online, and what not to
Not everything in the shop belongs online. The lines that work are the ones that travel well, have enough margin to absorb delivery and payment fees, and do not need to be explained or demonstrated in person. The lines that do not are heavy, fragile, low-margin, or sold on advice rather than on specification.
It is usually better to launch with twenty products done properly than three hundred with placeholder text and no photographs. A small, complete catalogue converts; a large, thin one does not, and it takes far longer to fix because the work is spread across hundreds of items.
Watch which of the first products actually sell and let that decide what you add. The answer is frequently not what you expected, and it is much cheaper to learn it from twenty products than from three hundred.
Questions
Selling products online — questions
What is the best way to sell products online for a small business?
Build your own store first and launch it to the customers you already have, then use social to point people at it, and add a marketplace third for lines where the commission is worth the reach. The common sequence — marketplace first because it has traffic — builds a business inside someone else's platform, with no customer list and no search authority of your own.
Should I sell on a marketplace or build my own store?
Both, in that order of importance rather than that order of ease. A marketplace gives you buyers today at the cost of a commission and the customer relationship. Your own store gives you margin, data and an asset that compounds, and no traffic until you earn it. Using a marketplace for reach while your own store holds your regulars is a stronger position than either alone.
Can I just sell through social media?
Plenty of businesses do, and for visual products with a strong local following it works. Two things to be clear-eyed about: reach is granted by an algorithm that can change, and orders arriving as messages are orders somebody has to type up. If social is your main channel, make sure the products and stock still live in one system and the messages become real orders rather than a parallel notebook.
How do I get people to my online store?
In order of cost-effectiveness: tell your existing customers directly, put the link everywhere your business already appears, share individual products rather than your homepage, and let the store accumulate search visibility over months — which is why owning the domain matters. Paid advertising works but is the wrong first move, because it is the most expensive way to find out your product pages do not convert yet.
How many products should I start with?
Around twenty, done properly, is a far better start than hundreds done thinly. Photograph them in one session, write honest descriptions, get the variants and stock right, and publish. Then let the first weeks of orders tell you what to add — that signal is worth more than any amount of guessing about what the catalogue should contain.
How long does setup take?
A single-counter shop is usually selling the same day. The work is the product list, not the software: import a spreadsheet, scan barcodes, or let Amina build products from a supplier invoice or a photo of your price list. A multi-location business with thousands of SKUs and opening stock counts should plan about a week and run the old system alongside for a fortnight. The 14-day trial is long enough to do exactly that.
Can I bring across the products I already have?
Yes — bulk import from CSV or Excel, including photos, variants, pack sizes, prices, cost prices and opening stock counts. If what you have is a supplier price list rather than a clean spreadsheet, Amina can build the catalogue from a photo or a PDF of it, which is usually faster than retyping.
How much does sell.ke cost?
Plans run from USD 12/month for a single-location till to USD 115/month for unlimited scale, with the online store on your own domain included from USD 23/month. In Kenya the same plans are KES 1,499 to KES 14,999/month, billed in shillings. Every plan starts with a 14-day trial and no card, and there is no per-terminal licence and no commission on your sales. There is no hardware to buy either — sell.ke runs on a phone, tablet or laptop you already own.
Which countries does sell.ke work in?
The software is not geographically limited — the counter, inventory, the storefront, reporting and accounting work anywhere, in multiple currencies. What is market-specific is two things: the payment rails available to you, and your country's tax-invoicing rules. We currently run with merchants in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana and Nigeria, and the deepest local payment and compliance integrations are in Kenya. If you are outside those markets, ask before you sign up and we will tell you precisely what would and would not be connected for you.
Read next
The other pages that answer the question you are probably about to ask.
How to set up an online store
The seven steps, in order, with the one that actually takes the time flagged.
Ecommerce website builder
An online store on your own domain, built from the catalogue you already sell from.
What an online store costs
The four cost shapes, what is genuinely unavoidable, and where budgets overrun.
POS that syncs with your website
Real-time stock between counter and storefront — because they are the same system.
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs all-in-one
Three different purchases, compared on architecture rather than feature counts.
Omnichannel retail management
Every channel drawing on one inventory, one customer record and one ledger.
How to sell on WhatsApp
Chat is where the sale happens. Here is how to stop it being where the record ends.
Go deeper on a feature
An online shop off the same stock
A branded storefront on your own domain, reading the same products, stock and prices as the till.
Customers and loyalty
Credit accounts that do not go missing, loyalty that returns, and a debtor list you can actually chase.
Delivery that pays for itself
Zones with their own rates, so the delivery fee covers the delivery instead of eating the margin.
Try it on your own products
Fourteen days, no card. Import your product list or let Amina build it from a photo of your price list, and run it alongside whatever you use now.