Choose where to sell online: my own store or marketplaces
Compares running your own store against marketplaces for your products, costs, and goals, then recommends a starting setup.
The prompt
Help me decide where to start selling my products online.
What I sell: [PRODUCTS, price range, handmade / resale / private label / digital]
Target customers and how they shop: [DETAILS]
Options I'm considering: [e.g. "my own store on a hosted platform, Etsy, Amazon, a local marketplace, social selling"]
Monthly budget for tools and ads: [AMOUNT]
Hours per week: [NUMBER]
My strengths: [e.g. "good at photos and social content", "no audience yet"]
Previous step (optional): [PASTE my margin calculation, so fees can be compared against real margins]
Compare the options on:
- Built-in traffic vs. needing to bring my own visitors.
- Fees and how they hit my margins (use my numbers; mark unknown rates [CONFIRM]).
- Control over branding, pricing, and customer data (emails, repeat buyers).
- Rules and risks: product restrictions, account suspension, policy changes, review requirements.
- Setup effort and ongoing work.
- Fit with my product type and customers.
Then:
1. Recommend a starting setup (often one main channel plus one secondary), and explain why.
2. Give me a setup checklist for the recommended channel(s): account, store settings, payments, tax settings, shipping profiles, policies, and legal pages.
3. Name the signal that should trigger adding a second channel.
Output: a comparison table, the recommendation, and the checklist. Remind me to check sales tax/VAT collection rules for where I sell; this is general information, not tax advice.
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Business Strategy & Startups prompts
What to fill in
- DETAILS
- AMOUNT
- NUMBER
- e.g. "good at photos and social content", "no audience yet"
- CONFIRM
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the Few-Shot structure (Few-shot prompting). A few-shot prompt includes one or more worked examples of the input and the output you want, so the model can copy the pattern instead of guessing it.
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