Do you still need a website if your enquiries come from IndiaMART?

This is the objection we hear most often, and it is a reasonable one. If a marketplace listing is producing enquiries today and the website is producing none, spending money on the website looks like the wrong move. Sometimes it is.

What a marketplace listing is good at

It puts you in front of buyers who are already looking, today, without you doing anything. It handles the discovery problem, which is the hardest problem. For a business that has just started selling outside its existing relationships, it is genuinely the fastest route to a first enquiry.

What it cannot do

• You appear beside your competitors, ranked by spend. The buyer is comparing you to four others on the same screen, and the ordering is influenced by who upgraded their listing.
• The platform owns the relationship. The enquiry arrives through them, the buyer's details sit with them, and the terms of that arrangement are theirs to change.
• You cannot show depth. A listing has room for a category and a few lines. It has no room for forty years of standing, a certification history, or a specification a buyer needs to check.
• It does not compound. Stop paying and the enquiries stop the same month. A product page you publish keeps working for years.

What buyers actually do

The pattern we see in audits is that serious buyers use both, in sequence. They find three suppliers on the marketplace, and then they search each company by name to check whether it is real. That second step is where the website either confirms what the listing implied or quietly contradicts it.

A buyer who finds a marketplace listing and then a website with a 2014 copyright line does not conclude that the website is neglected. They conclude that the company might be.

The order we would suggest

Keep the listing. It is producing enquiries and turning it off to prove a point costs you money. But before you buy the next listing upgrade, make sure that the buyer who searches your company name afterwards finds something that supports the decision they are about to make.

In practice that means three things exist and are correct: your range, your credentials, and a way to contact you that works on a phone. Everything else can wait.

When the honest answer is no

If you are a trader rather than a manufacturer, you have no proprietary range, and price is the only thing you compete on, a website will not change much. The marketplace is where price comparison happens and that is a reasonable place to be. We would rather tell you that than take the work.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.