Guide · Territory 2 You built the demand. And when it's time to buy, some of your customers type your name, see Amazon or a marketplace at the top, click, and buy there. The product sold — just not from you.
You paid for the awareness, the marketplace banked the conversion. You did the demand work, it took the margin and, along the way, the customer data. This isn't an awareness problem. It's a capture problem. And capture can be taken back.
A marketplace doesn't create your demand. It intercepts it. Two channels.
Someone searches your name, or your name + a product. If the marketplace ranks on those queries — and it often does, because its domain is colossal — it captures a click that was meant for you. This is the most expensive capture for you, because it's hot demand, already decided, that you generated yourself.
"castor oil for hair growth", "foundation for deep skin tones", "African & Caribbean grocery online". The searcher isn't looking for you yet — they're looking for a solution. The marketplace dominates these queries through sheer page count and slots itself between the need and you. You become a supplier in its catalogue, not a brand in the customer's mind. The more generics it captures, the more reviews it stacks up on your products, the more it then ranks on your brand. The loop closes.
Every sale that runs through a marketplace means a commission taken plus, often, pressure on price. The same sale direct leaves you the full margin. At volume, the gap is massive and compounds month after month.
This is the most underrated cost. A direct sale gives you an email, buying behaviour, the chance to build loyalty. A marketplace sale gives you an order number. The customer belongs to the platform, not to you.
The larger the share of your revenue running through a marketplace, the more power it holds over you: terms, ranking, fees, visibility. The day the rules change, you take the hit.
On a marketplace, you're one listing among thousands, in the platform's template. For an African or Black-owned brand whose strength is community connection and identity, that's a strategic impoverishment, not just a financial one.
The trap to avoid: trying to take everything back at once. Fighting a marketplace head-on across every generic means taking on a domain of several million pages. Smart reclaiming picks the winnable battles, in this order.
The Diagnostic shows the what and the how much. The how — the query-by-query, page-by-page reclaim — belongs to the engagement.
Not necessarily. They can stay a discovery or volume channel. The goal isn't to cut everything off, but to stop handing them the demand you create yourself — especially on your brand. We rebalance toward direct.
Because its domain is old, huge and technically very optimised. Google judges it trustworthy, so it ranks it — even on your name. On branded queries, that gap is very much closeable.
Impossible to say without looking at your data: Search Console, analytics, and your marketplace sales. That's exactly what a diagnostic quantifies, in order of magnitude, rather than throwing out a generic percentage.
Because taking on a domain of several million pages across the whole niche costs a lot and returns little. We pick the precise queries where your legitimacy beats their catalogue. Fewer fronts, more wins.
Yes, and the gap goes beyond the commission: full margin, the customer's email, the chance to build loyalty and bring them back, control of the experience. A direct sale builds your asset; a marketplace sale builds theirs.
The Diagnostic lays out the queries where a marketplace edges you out, the order of magnitude of the revenue flowing elsewhere, and the winnable battles ranked by effort/reward.
