▲ ▼ Small business's dependency on eCommerce giants
Small businesses sell their product on large eCommerce websites for their discovery and ease of use but are subject to their monopolistic behavior and loose out when the algorithms of the giants decide that their product is not good enough for their profit margin.
The solution for this has been for the businesses to have their eCommerce platform and there have been plenty of hosted or self-hosted tools to enable that.
Yet vast majority of small business are yet to venture into having their own eCommerce platform for various reasons such as,
- Awareness: Many just don't know that they can have their own eCommerce platform where they have better control over their sales.
- Discovery: They feel their product wouldn't be discovered on their own platform and they could be right. So discovery for products from small business needs to be addressed.
- Setup & Maintenance: Although the barriers to setup eCommerce platforms have come down drastically, It's still not accessible to someone who's not technically inclined. So they are forced to spend money on companies which would do it for them and often lock them to sub-par proprietary software and expensive life-long maintenance fees.
what a coincidence, I just posted a similar problem statement. :)