Where selling online in Finland actually starts
Selling online in Finland starts with one question that has nothing to do with software. Where does the person who wants your product look first? For a spare part for a Finnish tractor, the answer is a marketplace or a forum. For handmade ceramics from Fiskars, the answer is Instagram and then your own site. For office chairs sold to companies, the answer is Google and a quote request.
The channel follows the buyer, and the buyer rarely changes habits because you opened a shop. A marketplace borrows an audience that already exists. Your own store builds one that belongs to you. Both are real businesses, and plenty of Finnish companies run them at the same time.
What a marketplace gives you
A marketplace gives you traffic on day one and takes away every excuse about technology. Someone else runs the search, the checkout, the payment methods, the fraud checks and the phone support for the buyer who cannot log in. You upload products and you get orders.
That matters more than people admit. A small bakery in Tampere that wants to sell frozen pulla boxes across the country does not need a checkout project. It needs to find out whether anyone outside Pirkanmaa wants frozen pulla, and it needs to find out this month.
The second gift is trust by association. A first time buyer who has never heard of you will still hand over card details, because the card details are going to a name they already use. On your own domain, that same buyer hesitates and reads the About page.
Commission and who owns the customer
Commission is the smaller half of the price. The bigger half is that the buyer is not your buyer. Their email address, their order history and their permission to be contacted belong to the platform. Next month the platform can show them a competitor's product on your own listing page, and you have no say.
Work out the commission per order in euros, not in percent, and hold it against the gross margin of that single product. A 15 percent cut on a 19 euro accessory with a 6 euro margin is a different business from a 15 percent cut on a 400 euro sauna heater. Some products can afford a marketplace forever. Others only survive there as advertising.
The Finnish channels worth a look before you decide
Look at where your product category already trades before you pick a platform. In Finland that usually means a mix of large general marketplaces, category specialists, Tori for second hand and near new, and in business to business a lot of quiet selling through email and a price list.
Spend an afternoon as a buyer. Search for your own product the way a customer would type it, in Finnish and in English, and write down what comes back. If the first page is full of one marketplace, that is your answer for now. If the first page is small companies with their own domains, a marketplace will not save you and a good own store might.
VAT does not change because someone else takes the payment
You still sell under Finnish VAT rules when a marketplace processes the money for you. The Finnish Tax Administration lists the general rate at 25.5 percent, a reduced rate of 13.5 percent from 1 January 2026 for groceries, books, medicines, accommodation and similar categories, and 10 percent for newspapers and magazines. We checked those rates at vero.fi on 20 September 2026.
Two consequences follow. First, your marketplace price and your own store price contain the same tax, so the difference in what you keep is the commission, not the tax. Second, your bookkeeping needs the marketplace settlement reports in a form your accountant can read, because the payout you receive is never the same number as the sales you made.
If you sell to consumers in other EU countries as well, the rules about where the tax belongs deserve their own hour. We wrote that up in plain language in VAT for online sales in Finland.
Returns follow the law wherever you sell
A Finnish consumer buying at a distance has 14 days to withdraw from the purchase, counted from when the goods are received, and you have 14 days from their notice to refund. The consumer normally pays the return postage unless you promised otherwise. If you never told the buyer about the right of withdrawal, the period stretches to 12 months. That is the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority's own wording, checked at kkv.fi on 20 September 2026.
Plan the return route before the first order, not after the first complaint. There is a practical guide in shipping and returns for a Finnish webshop.
What a marketplace never gives you
It never gives you a brand that people remember. Buyers recall the platform and the product, rarely the seller. Ask anyone where they bought their last phone case.
It never gives you the full picture of why people did not buy. You see orders, not the search that ended in nothing, the size chart nobody understood, or the delivery estimate that lost the sale.
And it never protects you from the platform changing its mind. Fees rise, categories close, an algorithm reshuffles. That is not bad faith, it is simply somebody else's business plan.
Doing both without doubling the work
Run both by keeping one source of truth for products and stock, and letting every channel read from it. The moment you maintain two product lists by hand, you will oversell something on a Friday and spend Monday apologising.
The practical setup for a small Finnish company looks like this. Your own store holds the master catalogue, photos, descriptions and stock. The marketplace receives a subset, usually the products that travel well and carry enough margin. Orders from both land in the same place for picking, and stock drops in one system.
When the master catalogue lives on a store you control, adding a channel later is a data job rather than a rebuild. That is one of the reasons we build online stores on the client's own server with the catalogue in a structure the owner can export at any time.
Pricing on two channels without punishing yourself
Price the marketplace so the commission is already inside the number, and price your own store so the customer has a reason to come back to it. That reason is almost never a discount code. It is free delivery over a threshold, a bundle the platform does not allow, a longer warranty, or simply stock that the marketplace listing does not show.
Check the margin per product per channel once a quarter. Products drift. A courier price change or a new fee can quietly turn a decent seller into a loss that you only notice at the end of the year.
What your own store has to do well to earn its keep
It has to load fast on a phone on a bus, show stock and delivery honestly, take the payment methods Finnish buyers expect, and answer the questions your customers actually ask. That is the whole list, and most stores fail on the last one.
Payment is where trust is won or lost in Finland. A checkout without bank buttons and the invoice options people are used to will lose orders from buyers who were otherwise ready, and no amount of design rescues that. Ask five customers which method they used last time and build for their answer.
When to leave
Leave when the marketplace stops being a customer source and starts being a tax on customers you already have. There are four signals, and one is usually enough.
- Repeat buyers are ordering the same product through the platform month after month, which means you are paying commission on loyalty you earned.
- The fee per order has grown past the point where the product is profitable at a price the market accepts.
- The platform has put its own label or a competing seller on the listing you built.
- Your own store already covers its costs from direct traffic, and every hour you spend on marketplace admin is an hour not spent on it.
One thing to prepare before you go. You cannot take the buyer list with you, so give people a reason to find you again while you are still selling there. A packing slip with your own domain, a warranty registration, a spare parts guide. All within the platform rules, and all pointing home.
The order of moves that usually works
Start with whichever channel answers your riskiest question fastest. If the risk is that nobody wants the product, a marketplace answers that in six weeks for very little money. If the risk is that the product sells but the margin is thin, your own store answers it better, because thin margins cannot carry a commission.
A sequence we see work for small Finnish companies. Test on a marketplace for one season. Build the own store with the products that sold. Move the repeat buyers over with better service instead of coupons. Keep the marketplace for discovery of new lines only.
The platform question underneath all of this
Once you decide to have your own store, the next fork is whether to rent the software or own it. Rented platforms are quick and predictable, and they charge you a share of your growth. A store on your own server costs more attention and keeps the data, the design and the monthly bill under your control.
Neither answer is universally right, and the honest version depends on your catalogue size, how odd your products are, and whether anyone in the company enjoys admin. We laid the two side by side in Shopify or your own online store in Finland.
Five questions before you commit
Answer these in writing, with numbers where you can.
- What is my gross margin in euros on the three products I expect to sell most?
- What does one order cost me in commission, payment fee, packaging and delivery on each channel?
- Where does my buyer actually look first, and how do I know that rather than assume it?
- If the marketplace doubled its fee next year, what would I do the following week?
- Who in the company answers a customer message within a working day, and on which channels?
If the fifth question has no answer, fix that before anything else. Both channels punish silence, and only one of them lets you apologise in your own words.