The main pain points that Bob Shop, or any other marketplace, solve for entrepreneurs selling online is that it makes it easy for you to get going very quickly so you can experiment with products. You don't have to have this whole long lead time to set up your own website. 

Most e-commerce entrepreneurs probably wouldn't be very technical themselves or have technical expertise. Therefore, they need to choose a platform that makes it easy for them to not get bogged down in all the technical details of setting up their site. 

The advantages of using an established online marketplace versus starting your own website is that using a marketplace can allow you to get going very quickly. You can test the market. The disadvantage of a marketplace is it's not really your customer necessarily; instead, you are helping build someone else's brand. 

I think a lot of people look at the fees marketplaces charge and that can be quite high. At Bob Shop, the seller success fee we charge ranges between 5% and 10%. It definitely goes up higher than that with other marketplaces.

For me it boils down to trust and safety issues, good communication and offering your customers a good deal on the shipping side of things.

To gauge the success of your website, you should obviously first and foremost look at the sales and, I would argue, the conversion rates. A rough rule-of-thumb average would be that between 2% and 3% of people visiting your site should do an actual transaction. That's one measure to determine the success of your site. 

First of all, you want to avoid getting a lot of returns because returns are a big issue. Therefore, make sure it's a good quality product and that you can describe and explain it properly to a customer, so that they're not going to get surprises and want to return it.

Ways of improving conversion have to do with trust, safety and with good shipping rates. Payments are critically important and it fits into trust and safety because the buyer has to hand over their money. Offer as many payment options as possible so that the buyer can choose what they are most comfortable paying with.

Social media can definitely play an important role in the overall marketing mix when selling online. However, I generally see better conversion to sales when buyers come from other platforms, specifically paid marketing platforms like Google AdWords. I've seen more success there than from social media platforms.

A lot of sales currently happen in what can be called conversational commerce. It is sales that happen in conversation and in South Africa, I'm pretty sure WhatsApp dominates that space. It’s something that shouldn't be underestimated and you should think about how you're going to manage that, because obviously it does involve some interaction.