Social media is becoming one of the key forces in the ecommerce industry.
According to recent research, 98% of online shoppers are also social media users, and 55% of consumers shopping on online marketplaces use social media to research products before making a purchase.
Moreover, eBay and other marketplaces enable sellers to share their product listings directly on their brand’s social media accounts.
Consequently, creator-first brands can leverage this opportunity to drive organic traffic from their social media accounts to their stores on online marketplaces, thereby reducing their CAC costs.
This, however, doesn’t mean the marketplace-first strategy that relies on product listing promotion is no longer relevant. It instead means that brands should take a hybrid approach to ensure growth in their domestic or international marketplaces.
Dive in to learn more about marketplace-first vs creator-first ecommerce brands and how you can drive engagement and traffic to your store using the power of content creation and social media.
Key takeaways
- Marketplace-first brands are experiencing margin erosion due to rising advertising costs.
- Creator-first brands selling on online marketplaces benefit from direct-to-listing external organic traffic.
- Marketplace-first brands have a pricing and logistics advantage over creator-first brands that don’t make their products available on online marketplaces.
- A creator-first approach prioritizes building demand for a product on social media over product sales.
- Marketplace-first strategy should combine product listing optimization for the platform’s search engine with paid advertising to deliver the desired results.
What is a marketplace-first brand?
A marketplace-native brand is an ecommerce business that manages the sales, promotion, and fulfillment of its products through an ecommerce platform like eBay or Amazon.
These brands rely on online marketplaces to reach their target audiences, maximize cross-border selling opportunities, offer competitive pricing, and streamline logistics.
Online ecommerce platforms give marketplace-first brands an advantage, as they don’t have to worry about building an audience for their products or finding logistics providers.
Moreover, marketplace-first brands often focus on sales volume, enabling them to offer lower prices to customers and keep internal overhead low.
As of early 2026, eBay has 18.3 million active sellers worldwide and hosts over 2.3 billion active product listings. Consequently, reaching customers is becoming progressively more difficult for marketplace-first brands.
That’s why the majority of professional sellers use the native advertising tools of their go-to online marketplace to secure high product visibility and generate sales.
In fact, using paid advertising on popular marketplaces can improve a listing’s visibility by 70% to 80% and double its conversion rates.
Nonetheless, the costs of acquiring customers through Cost-per-Click (CPC) or Cost-per-Sale (CPS) campaigns are steadily increasing, cutting into the profit margins of high-volume sellers.
At the same time, marketplace-first brands are struggling to re-engage customers they obtain through ads on online marketplaces due to the fact that they have limited access to customer data.
What is a creator-first brand?
A creator-first brand is an ecommerce business that primarily uses third-party platforms for conversion and logistics, while relying on social media and other external sources to establish brand identity, build an audience, and attract attention to itself.
Unlike marketplace-first brands that start with products and search for an audience on online marketplaces, creator-first brands initially focus on building an audience and creating products for that customer base before finding ways to distribute those products across multiple sales channels.
By doing so, creator-first brands prioritize building a community rather than generating traffic through ads or product description optimization, which allows them to maintain brand control while avoiding hidden costs and reducing CAC significantly.
Still, to attract attention and build a community and generate consumer demand, these brands must invest heavily in producing social media content and influencer partnerships to drive organic traffic to their brand.com or online marketplace stores.
As a result, creator-first brands are facing much higher initial costs than marketplace-first brands, but secure higher profit margins by reducing or eliminating ad fees.
Despite the high costs of content creation, this approach enables brands to build trust with their audience, which results in higher customer retention and more repeat purchases over time.
Additionally, the creator-first strategy allows businesses to reduce their long-term costs within an online marketplace while gradually improving their conversion rates.
The differences between a marketplace and a creator-first brand
These two types of ecommerce strategies differ in several key areas, including where brands create their online stores.
Marketplace-first brands build storefronts on established marketplaces to distribute their products. In contrast, creator-first brands often have their own websites and use online marketplaces only to diversify revenue streams and increase sales.
These ecommerce brand types take different approaches to traffic generation. Marketplace-first brands rely on advertising and SEO on a specific online marketplace to drive traffic to their stores, while creator-first brands prioritize external traffic sources.
Consequently, creator-first brands aim to generate product demand through TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or email, and then direct traffic to products tailored to their audiences’ needs on their websites or storefronts on online marketplaces.
Conversely, marketplace-first brands usually offer high-demand items from popular product categories such as electronics or toys and promote them through the platform’s native advertising tools.
Additionally, a marketplace-first approach prioritizes volume and efficiency to facilitate growth, while creator-first brands use community building and storytelling as the foundation of their growth strategy.
The upside of a creator-first approach to ecommerce
The rapid rise of social commerce and the creator economy is one of the key reasons creator-first brands are becoming exceedingly successful on online marketplaces.
Moreover, online marketplaces like eBay make it easy to share links to product listings on social media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
Creator-first brands benefit from social media tools available on online marketplaces, as they enable them to share a single product listing or their entire storefront on their social media accounts.
Consistently investing in content production and influencer partnerships allows creator-first brands to establish authority and attract the attention of audiences that don’t necessarily shop on online marketplaces where these brands list their products.
Most importantly, this approach allows brands to build a loyal audience that follows them on social media and expand the reach of their products far beyond online marketplaces.
The high influx of external traffic also serves as a positive signal to the marketplace’s internal search engine, improving the visibility of a brand’s product listings.
Consequently, adopting a creator-first approach can enhance a brand’s SEO efforts on eBay, Amazon, or other online marketplaces.
Combining marketplace-first and creator-first approaches to brand promotion on online marketplaces
Marketplace sellers don’t have to choose between marketplace-first and creator-first strategies, because combining them can unlock immense growth opportunities.
Even as customer acquisition costs rise, promoting products through ads remains highly effective because it boosts key performance metrics such as impressions, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
On the other hand, creator-first brands rarely promote a single SKU and instead focus on generating brand value and lifestyle promotion, which helps them improve their average order value.
When put together, these two approaches to ecommerce become a powerful dynamo capable of generating high sales volume while increasing customer retention and building a community of loyal customers around the brand.
Additionally, combining marketplace-first and creator-first strategies helps sellers diversify their AOV drivers, as they can benefit from having their listings featured in AI recommendations and from capitalizing on community loyalty at the same time.
Exceeding the limitations of the marketplace-first approach through content-driven brand strategies
As online marketplaces continue to evolve, the omnichannel approach to advertising and sales is becoming more dominant.
Putting all their efforts into the marketplace-first approach can prevent sellers on online marketplaces from growing their businesses sustainably, as it limits their primary traffic sources.
Paid and organic search traffic on an online marketplace are often insufficient for continued growth due to rising customer acquisition costs.
Hence, shifting their focus to a creator-first approach and strategically allocating resources to content production and community building enables sellers to diversify traffic sources, expand the reach of their products, and diversify sales channels.
Still, it’s essential to understand the limitations of the creator-first approach for sellers on online marketplaces, because eBay, Amazon, and other platforms have strict fee-circumvention policies that penalize sellers for driving customers away from the platform.
As a result, merchants shouldn’t abandon the marketplace-first approach, especially its paid advertising aspect, because it helps them secure high visibility for their products and brands.
Scaling a marketplace-first brand with a creator-first approach
The advertising costs of a marketplace-first brand can reach 25% to 30% of its revenue, reducing the brand’s profit margins and limiting its growth potential.
On the other hand, creator-first brands are successfully avoiding high advertising costs by using storytelling and engaging social media content to capture the audience’s attention and generate interest in themselves rather than their individual products.
In doing so, they’re building communities that enable them to secure a steady source of external organic traffic and increase average order value.
Still, this approach to ecommerce isn’t flawless, since brands must invest in creating high-quality content that captures their target audiences’ attention.
That’s why many brands are starting to combine the marketplace-first and creator-first approaches, as they are often the best option for sellers on online marketplaces because they enable them to build brand loyalty while making the most of the marketplace’s internal paid advertising opportunities.
Do you need help scaling your business on eBay’s domestic and international marketplaces? Webinterpret may be the right solution! Schedule a call to find out why!
About Webinterpret
Webinterpret supports merchants selling on eBay.
Our AI-based solutions enable more effective selling through automated listing localisation, optimisation, advertising, and returns, and ensure all products placed on EU markets are GPSR-compliant.
By giving your international and domestic customers a full, end-to-end local shopping experience, Webinterpret improves your conversion rates and helps establish your business locally and globally.
