The comparison you were going to do anyway
Spreadsheet, marketplace back office, generic commerce software, or here. Compared on what actually costs you time.
Luxembourg Gardens
1906
William James Glackens
How the alternatives compare
Read down the column you are on today.
| How the alternatives compare, capability by capability | A spreadsheetThe stock list you keep in Excel or Numbers. | One marketplaceEverything run from a single marketplace's own back office. | A storefront builderA product that publishes your own site and nothing beyond it. | WorldwatchOne record per watch, published out to the channels you already sell on. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One record per watch | A row holds what you typed into it. Specification, photographs and the purchase invoice live somewhere else. | The listing is the record, so a watch you have not listed there is not in the system at all. | A catalogue product entry, with the reference and what you paid bolted on if at all. | Reference, specification, photographs, acquisition price, supplier and invoice on one record, which every listing reads from. |
| Publishing to more than one place | You retype the watch into each platform's own form. | Not what the product is for. A second channel is a second manual workflow. | Your own site, plus any feed you maintain by hand. | One listing form publishes to eBay, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wristler and Bezel, alongside feeds you define yourself. |
| Taking it down when it sells | You remember, or you sell it twice. | Handled, on the one channel there is. | Handled on your own site. Anywhere else is yours to remember. | Marking a watch sold unlists it on the connected channels in the same step, and will not complete while a live listing is left standing. |
| What the margin is measured against | Whatever you typed in the cost column, assuming you keep one. | Sale price and that platform's fees. What you paid for the watch is not theirs to know. | Order totals. Cost of goods usually lives in your accounting package. | Acquisition price, date, supplier and the purchase invoice sit on the watch, so realised margin is computed rather than estimated. |
| Orders and their paperwork | A folder of PDFs named after the buyer, mostly. | That platform's orders only, in that platform's format. | Your own site's orders. Marketplace sales stay where they happened. | Sell and buy orders together, with invoices, credit notes, pro formas, tracking and the insurance certificate attached to the order itself. |
| Numbers you can price against | Whatever you are willing to build with a pivot table. | Your performance on that channel, which is not the same thing as your business. | Storefront traffic and revenue. | Revenue, realised margin, return on investment by brand, stock value, price distribution, and share of revenue per channel including sales you made off-platform. |
| Commission on what you sell | None, and no distribution either. | That marketplace’s own rate on every sale it settles. | Usually none beyond payment processing. | None on the Worldwatch marketplace. A sale on a connected marketplace still carries that marketplace's fee, deducted by them; Worldwatch adds nothing on top of it. |
| Getting your existing stock in | It is already there, in the shape you invented. | Your listings are the stock, and exporting them is the platform's decision. | A product export, in a catalogue shape. | An import that reads a connected channel, a feed URL, an uploaded CSV, XLSX, JSON or XML file, or your own website, shows you everything it found, and writes nothing until you confirm. |
The alternatives are categories rather than named products, because what any given platform does changes without telling us and one stale cell discredits the whole table. No rate is quoted here for the same reason. The marketplace commissions Worldwatch can state are on the pricing page.
What switching actually involves
- From a spreadsheet
- The import reads the file you already keep, lets you map your columns onto ours, and shows you every row it found before it writes one. What you gain is distribution. What it costs is the subscription and the afternoon it takes to check the mapping.
- From one marketplace
- Keep it. Connect it, and add the others your buyers use. That marketplace goes on charging what it charges, and Worldwatch adds nothing on top; what changes is that the cost, the supplier and the margin stop living only in your head.
- From a storefront you already run
- Worldwatch does not replace it. Shopify and WooCommerce connect as channels, so the shop your customers know stays exactly where it is and the back office is what moves.
Who should not buy this
- Your stock is small and stays small
- If you turn over a handful of watches a year, retyping them is not what your week costs. A spreadsheet is the right tool for that and it is free.
- You sell in the shop and nowhere else
- Channel publishing is most of what you would be paying for. If buyers walk through the door and nothing is listed online, the parts that earn the subscription are the parts you would never switch on.
- You sell to a closed book of clients
- Contacts, notes and the activity feed are real and they are useful, but they are one part of a larger product. If you never intend to list publicly, they are unlikely to justify a plan on their own.
Put your stock to work
Import what you already hold, connect a channel, and see what moves. The free plan needs no card, and selling on the Worldwatch marketplace costs no commission.
Questions first? Ask us and we will walk through it with your own stock.