What is the difference between independent station and platform? Which would be better?

Maybe many friends are already very familiar with e-commerce platforms. In short, it means opening a store on the platform, display goods according to the rules of the platform, and charging a certain commission when transactions occur on the platform.

      The main advantages of e-commerce platform are:

        1. It is relatively simple to start.

        2. There are a large number of ready-made traffic in the platform, and they are all very high traffic with shopping intention.

Now the platform traffic bonus period has declined significantly, and being a third-party platform seller is also facing great challenges. The main challenges are:

1. There are many sellers of the same type on the platform who sell products with highly similar functions, styles and prices.Itmeans that it will cause more intense homogeneous competition. Especially when products and brands have no advantages, it is easy to be lost in the massive information of similar products, and it is difficult to get the attention of consumers.
2. Consumers on the e-commerce platform may not notice your brand or store name even if they buy your products under the allocation of the platform algorithm. The most typical is Amazon.For sellers, because the e-commerce platform blocks the direct communication between sellers and consumers, and will not share consumer data and contact information with sellers, as a platform, sellers will have no way to accumulate their own user data and make repeated sales in the future.
3. You must follow all the rules of the platform and lose some of your power. In fact, you are working for the platform and can only retain a little profit except the commission you need to pay.

What are the advantages of Shopify?

Let\’s talk about the advantages of independent stations.

The first thing is that you can accumulate your own users for subsequent continuous repeated marketing and cross selling. Although it will be difficult to start at the beginning, but with the accumulation of your users, the value of your shops will be greater and greater.

Secondly, Shopify can completely control its own brand and take a very flexible way to design and publicize marketing activities. These will not be constrained by changes in some policies or rules of the platform.

Thirdly, online shops like Shopify are becoming easier and cheaper to set up. Some Chinese agents in the supply chain will help you do a good job. You just need to concentrate on sales and brand building.

Of course, doing Shopify will also have corresponding deficiencies and challenges. In short, there are two points:

1. The biggest problem with Shopify is that there is no free natural traffic. We need to find our own drainage channels, as well as the operation of users to do a good job in drainage, retention and transformation of users.
2. It\’s easy to meet some novice agents. Their unprofessionality will cause you to encounter a lot of trouble.More formal and larger ones such as CJ and E7 will be better choices. Of course, the price of CJ will be higher and the service industry will be more layered. If you are a user with an order quantity of less than 500 a day, you may be treated differently.