Well, so we guess that you are a modern businessman or a businesswoman who set their sights on the new, exciting world of web commerce, also known as e-commerce. Is that so? If the answer is yes, then proceeding to this article will straighten a lot of questions out for you, making your understanding of web retail much more deep, complex and crystal clear – which eventually will be a huge edge over your fellow beginner competitors, will it not? So, the first thing’s first – let’s begin by describing each specific type of money-making platform in question. In regard to the title, the concept of e-stores has called dibs on being discussed first in turn. So, this medium for business is known to be born immediately with the World Wide Web going public for the first time – which happened back in 1994 (if you live in the US or just any other OECD country). Which was no wonder, as during the first few months of its existence the then-new phenomena called Internet caught like a wildfire.

Then again, with the first websites created back in then visually coming right out of your aunt’s nightmare and being extremely limited in the terms of which kind of functional or even browsing, UI/UX experience was available, the e-stores were primitive at first too… But it wasn’t long, until the beginning of the new century saw this industry skyrocket after the “dotcom-bubble” burst in 2000… Nowadays, and for some ten or fifteen years in the row so fat, the e-commerce has grown to become a huge science. Web developers actually try to lure your e-stores visitors in as much as they can, with the use of good old techniques first implemented for “offline” retail back in the XIXth century. Showcasing the items – this is one big trend. Anyways, there is one more huge, tough ordeal to deal with – if you own not a web e-commerce marketplace, but rather an e-store. That is the fact that you are bound to list all the items there yourself, pics, descriptions and manufacturing including…
Eventually, this takes the biggest chunk of your time as an e-store owner or an admin.

• Making sure that your e-store mirrors offline catalog
• Making sure to capture or upload image (s) for all the items
• Writing down “selling” descriptions and CTAs
• Keeping up with the item being in stock or not

So, while the process is indeed time-consuming, there are some pros and a bright side to that just as well. The bright side being the fact that you actually either manufacture or enlist all of the items on your e-store yourself. As opposed to that, when you run a marketplace e-commerce website, it’s not your problem to either manufacture anything yourself, list it yourself, take and upload images of it yourself or pen the descriptions of it all by… yourself. In the marketplace world, it’s you who lures manufacturers, so that they come to you, and add their own items to your website, in order to attract some sales. This effectively means, that while this gives less of a freedom of actually managing the state of your stock and range, it leaves you with much less pain in the ass about it too. So, what business model suits the modern US market the best? The answer would wholly depend on such factors as the niche, the reach, and your business’ budget.