This is the question that stops most sellers, and it deserves a better answer than the two it usually gets. One is a vendor promising that owning your store unlocks growth. The other is a forum post saying nobody will ever find you.
The accurate version is more specific than either: a marketplace was providing one particular service, that service ends on the day you leave, and four other channels have to cover it. Knowing which service, precisely, is what makes the rest of this planable.
What the marketplace was actually doing for you
Not "sending traffic". Something narrower.
It ran a search engine with buyers already inside it. People arrived at the platform intending to buy something in your category, typed a query, and your listing was one of the results. You did not have to acquire that person. They were already there.
It supplied trust you did not have to build. A buyer who has never heard of you will still check out, because they are not trusting you, they are trusting the platform's payment, review and refund system.
It provided a category context. Your product sat next to similar products, in a place where browsing was the point.
And it did some of its own external marketing, which brought people in who then found you.
What it did not do is give you the customer. The buyer is the platform's relationship. That distinction is the whole argument for leaving and also the reason leaving is hard, and it is worth being precise about which side of it you are on.
Find out what share you already own
Before planning anything, get the actual split from your own account, because it changes what this project looks like.
Most marketplaces separate, in the seller's own stats, the visits their own search and browse sent you from the visits that arrived from somewhere else: your social posts, your email, a link on your own site, an external search result.
Look up that split for the last twelve months. It takes five minutes and it is the most important number in the decision.
A shop where the great majority of visits came from marketplace search is a shop whose audience belongs to the platform. Leaving means starting the acquisition problem close to zero.
A shop where a meaningful share came from outside already has an audience of its own, and the move is a transfer rather than a rebuild.
Neither result is a verdict. Both change the size of the job by a lot, and the second half of our article on measuring your marketplace dependence turns it into a score you can act on.
The four channels that have to replace it
There are only four ways people arrive at a store you own, and every plan is some mix of them.
1. Search
People typing what they want into a general search engine and finding your pages. This is the channel most similar to what the marketplace was doing, and it is the slowest to build.
Two things separate it from marketplace search. It is a much larger pool with much broader competition, and the pages that rank are frequently not product pages but category pages and content. That reframing is the single biggest adjustment for a seller whose entire SEO experience is listing optimization.
2. Audience you own
Email, most of all. A list is the only asset in this list that no platform can take away and no algorithm can down-rank.
It is also the one most sellers arrive with least of, because marketplaces generally restrict contacting buyers for marketing, and doing it against their terms is a real risk while you are still selling there.
Starting a list on day one is the highest-value thing on this page, and it is the thing most sellers start in month eight.
3. Social and referral
Where the audience is depends entirely on the product, and a general answer is not useful. What is general: social platforms are borrowed audiences too. They are a better borrowed audience than a marketplace, because you can move people from them onto a list you own, and they are still not yours.
4. Paid traffic
The fastest and the only one that costs money per visit rather than time. It is also the one that makes the trade explicit: the marketplace's fee was, among other things, a customer acquisition cost you paid on the way out. Off the marketplace, some of that cost comes back as an advertising budget you pay on the way in.
Working out whether that trade is favorable for your business is arithmetic, and it is what our fee and cost calculator exists to help you run on your own numbers rather than on somebody's published average.
Why the timelines you have read disagree
Search for how long this takes and you will find confident answers that contradict each other. Some say months, some say a year, and the numbers are frequently presented without any statement of what they assume.
They disagree because the answer depends on variables the pages do not state: how competitive your category is, how much content and how many pages you have, whether you arrive with an audience or with none, whether you are spending on ads, what your price point is, and how much of your previous traffic was already yours.
This site does not publish a timeline as its own prediction, and any figure you see quoted anywhere on this subject should be read alongside the question of what it assumed. What is safe to say, and what every honest source agrees on, is that it is slower than the vendor pages imply and that the first stretch is quiet.
Our article on how long it takes to replace marketplace income goes into what actually drives that, and why it is not one number.
The sequence that most reliably works
Not a promise, and not a schedule. An ordering, based on which asset compounds and which decays.
Start the email list before you need it, including while you are still on the marketplace, using every route the platform's terms permit. Product inserts and your own social are the usual ones.
Build the pages that can rank before you build the traffic, because a store with three product pages has nothing to rank. Category and collection pages are the ones that carry breadth.
Use paid traffic to buy data, not sales, at first. A small budget that tells you which products and which audiences respond is worth more early than the orders it produces.
Then compound whichever channel showed a signal. Most stores end up with one channel doing most of the work, and which one is not predictable in advance.
What to do while it is quiet
The hardest part of this is not strategic. It is the stretch where you have done the work and nothing is happening, and the temptation is to change everything every week.
Two things are worth knowing about that period. It is normal, and it is the reason overlapping the move with the marketplace exists as an option. Running both while the new store builds is the version of this with the least risk attached, and our guide to opening your own store while still selling on the marketplace covers what that involves.
And the marketplace does not disappear when you open a store. The decision to leave and the decision to open are two separate decisions, and taking them in that order is how most of the damage gets done.
For the wider version of the decision this all sits inside, our pillar on whether you should move at all is the place to start.