A website or a marketplace profile

What a marketplace actually provides

Demand, immediately. Somebody has already decided to hire and is choosing between providers, which is the most valuable moment in the whole process and the hardest to reach on your own.

It also provides trust you have not earned yet. A new business with no reviews benefits enormously from a platform that supplies a rating system and a dispute process.

For a business starting out, those two together are worth the commission. The mistake is treating a useful start as a permanent arrangement.

What it costs beyond the fee

The customer relationship belongs to the platform. Repeat work, referrals and reviews accumulate there rather than with you, which means the value you build is not portable.

The terms are theirs to change. Fees rise, ranking rules change, categories are restructured, and a business whose entire pipeline runs through one platform has no response available.

And you compete on their terms, usually on price. A marketplace is designed to make providers comparable, which is precisely the opposite of what differentiates a good business.

What a website provides instead

Enquiries with no commission, from people who chose you specifically rather than picking from a list. Those convert better and negotiate less, and a page an answer engine can quote keeps producing them.

An asset that accumulates. Every page that answers a question keeps working, and the visibility compounds rather than resetting when a platform changes its rules.

And the ability to be specific. Our page on choosing sources covers why specific material wins, and a profile template offers almost no room for it.

Using both properly

The list below is how to take the benefit of a marketplace without becoming dependent on one. None of it breaches platform rules, and all of it builds something you keep.

• Keep the profile complete and active while it earns
• Point every offline mention at your own address
• Ask satisfied customers for a review on a platform you control too
• Record where each enquiry actually came from
• Build the pages that answer questions the profile cannot
• Move repeat customers to a direct route
• Track the share of work that arrives commission-free

Watch the ratio

The number that matters is the share of your work arriving without a commission. If it is not moving over a year, the website is not doing its job and the dependence is deepening.

Measure it deliberately rather than by impression. Ask every new customer how they found you, and write it down, because memory reliably overstates the direct route.

Our page on auditing a site covers the wider picture. A single honest number here changes how a business allocates effort.

Reviews and where they live

Reviews on a marketplace stay there. They build the platform's credibility and yours only within it, and they vanish from your view if you ever leave.

Ask for reviews in more than one place, within whatever the platform's rules allow. Our page on reviews covers what you may do with them afterward.

A business profile you control is usually the most valuable destination, because it feeds local search results directly and you keep it whatever else changes.

When to keep relying on one

When the work is genuinely one-off and the customer would never return anyway. Some trades are like this, and in those the commission buys something a website cannot replace.

When you are starting and have no reviews, no visibility and no time. Take the leads, do good work, and start building the direct route in parallel rather than afterward.

The failure is not using a marketplace. It is using one for five years and having nothing of your own when the terms change.