Why so many sellers never turn a profit
Most mistakes sellers make on marketplaces are, objectively, beginner-level. Some run ads at inflated bids. Some never work keywords into their product cards. Others trade on marketplaces without ever calculating unit economics. And some cannot push their content conversion above 50%.
People sell on a marketplace for years without putting in any real effort to understand the business. Here are the three main reasons sellers on Ozon, Wildberries and Yandex Market usually fail to make money.
Third place: laziness and ego
If sales periodically stall, drop, and you do not know what to do, this is for you. Third place goes to laziness and ego. In my view, laziness has ruined far more promising marketplace stores than economic problems or badly set-up advertising.
A huge number of people are too lazy to put in a little more effort, to give the business 4-5 hours a day instead of 2. They are too lazy to take training, too lazy to work with experts, convinced they will figure everything out on their own. They do not realise that learning on the marketplace by trial and error is very expensive and very slow.
Why working with an expert speeds things up
The fastest way to get into any topic is to talk to someone who has worked in it for years and get answers to your questions, then stay in touch as new questions come up. A good expert answers from their own experience, and from their own money, which is essentially the experience you would otherwise buy yourself.
Working with an expert and learning the marketplace business under their supervision is the right strategy if you want to build a marketplace business quickly and with the least money spent. But people have ego. They say they will figure it out themselves and will not pay some expert.
I have seen many such sellers. A few really do work out every nuance alone. But most lose both time and money, and often burn out and leave the field having earned nothing. This is a mass story, so think about it before you reject the idea of learning the business together with an expert. Paired with the right expert, you will earn significantly more and significantly faster than going it alone.
The child's position: "everyone owes me"
As a technology partner, I often meet sellers who believe everyone owes them something. That the marketplace should bring them customers, give them low commissions, and push their positions in promotions. That experts on YouTube should hand out knowledge for free, knowledge they built up day and night on live projects.
Plenty of people believe the world owes them. I call this the child's position: sulking and taking offence when the chocolate is not handed over. You could say this is all fluff. But after working with several hundred stores, I can say with confidence: problems with unit economics and low margins are a matter of tools you can learn. The problems with ego and the child's position sit in people's heads and, in my experience, are much harder to remove.
First place: a casual approach
The top of the ranking is a casual approach.
As I said, the main reason a huge number of sellers fail to build a business on a marketplace is complacency. For some reason people think that once they open a store, they are entrepreneurs and money will flow. In reality, opening a store is the easiest part.
The hard part is making the store profitable, and not giving up when nothing seems to work and sales stand still. That is exactly where most sellers fall off. They want fast results, cannot handle the load, and start making mistakes. A huge number of people have lost millions in capital tied up in stock, product cards and advertising at this stage. They treat a marketplace business as a light adventure, assuming they will not have to push through their own fears and limits.
That is the biggest mistake. Product business on marketplaces is not for everyone. Not everyone is physically ready to endure that level of stress and uncertainty.
Business means uncertainty and stress
Your own business is always uncertainty. You do not know what will happen to it in a month, two months, six months, yet you still have to plan tomorrow. You have to buy stock without knowing how the exchange rate will move while the goods travel to your warehouse. That is enormous stress, and not everyone actually needs it. Yet people who think they know a secret, inspired by videos online, enter a marketplace and lose hundreds of thousands.
Teaching is harder than selling
People regularly tell me that selling courses on starting and growing a marketplace business is selling air, and that it is easy. Well, try selling air to people who are supposedly foolish enough to pay tens or hundreds of thousands for it. In my view, selling marketplace training is far harder than selling products on marketplaces. But that is not the point. The point is that any business demands a serious approach.
I am not saying you need to sit with a serious face and set up ads. I mean you need to treat the business as a business: something where you can easily lose hundreds of thousands or millions, something where the result depends only on you and your actions.
Nobody will solve your problems for you
While you do nothing and hope it will sort itself out, or that someone will fix your business for you, there will be no result. No sales, no profit. At best you stand still, and your income may even fall. That is reality. No uncle will come and solve your problems for you, because the uncle who should solve them is you.
Takeaway
The main causes of failure are laziness, ego and a casual approach. A marketplace business takes effort and a readiness for uncertainty. Working with an expert helps you master the platform faster and avoid losses.
