There has never been an easier time to put a small business online.
A new company can create an Instagram profile in minutes, open a Facebook page without paying anything, start selling through Etsy or eBay, launch a Shopify store, assemble a Squarespace site from a template, hire somebody through Fiverr and begin advertising to customers without ever speaking to a local developer, designer or marketing agency.
That accessibility has been one of the most important changes in modern small business. Tools that once required specialist knowledge and substantial investment are now available to almost anyone with a smartphone and a bank card.
For thousands of businesses, that has been genuinely positive. A maker can reach customers outside their town. A café can publish its menu instantly. A sole trader can show completed work without commissioning a bespoke website. A retailer can take card payments without building its own e-commerce infrastructure. A new business can test an idea before spending heavily on premises, software or advertising.
But convenience has created a less obvious trade-off.
The easier it becomes to operate through somebody else's platform, the easier it becomes to mistake access for ownership.
A business may have thousands of followers on Facebook, hundreds of Etsy sales or an entire customer journey running through Shopify, Instagram, Google or another service. That can feel like a strong digital position. In many cases it is.
But the business does not own Facebook. It does not control Instagram's feed. It does not decide Etsy's marketplace rules. It does not set Google's search layout. It does not determine how a website builder structures its product, what features remain available, how pricing changes or what happens when ownership of the platform itself changes.
The distinction matters because small businesses are increasingly building valuable parts of their commercial identity on digital ground controlled by companies operating at a scale no local business can realistically match.
The platforms are not small tools any more
It is easy to think of services such as Squarespace, Shopify, Facebook or Etsy simply as useful software products.
Economically, they are much more than that.
Squarespace, for example, was acquired by global investment firm Permira in October 2024 in a transaction valuing the company at approximately $7.2 billion. Permira explicitly described Squarespace as a platform serving entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses and said it intended to support continued growth and expansion of the product suite.
Shopify operates on an even larger scale. Its current investor materials describe millions of merchants in more than 175 countries, with cumulative gross merchandise volume exceeding $1.6 trillion. During the second quarter of 2026 alone, merchants processed more than $115 billion in GMV through the platform.
Creative marketplaces have consolidated too. Shutterstock completed its acquisition of Envato in 2024 for roughly $250 million. At completion, Shutterstock said Envato brought 650,000 subscribers and millions of creative assets, including website templates, WordPress themes, graphics, video, audio and other content used heavily by freelancers, small businesses and agencies.
These are not side projects competing with a designer in Pontypridd or an independent retailer in Treorchy on equal terms.
They are global platforms with enormous technical infrastructure, marketing reach, data, investment capital and the ability to spread product-development costs across millions of users.
That scale is precisely why the products are useful.
It is also why the competitive environment around small businesses has changed so dramatically.
Scale changes what “competition” means
A local business usually has to make money from a relatively small number of customers.
A digital platform can operate very differently.
It can invest heavily in product development, advertising, partnerships, sponsorship, artificial intelligence and customer acquisition because each improvement can potentially be sold across an international user base.
A local web designer might spend several days building a booking system for one client. A platform can spend millions developing a booking feature once and then sell access to it to hundreds of thousands of businesses.
A local retailer must decide whether a newspaper advert, Facebook campaign or shop refurbishment produces enough return to justify the cost. A major technology company can run national advertising across television, radio, podcasts, social media, search and sponsorship because it is acquiring customers across entire countries.
This does not mean large platforms are behaving unfairly simply by being large.
It means small businesses need to understand that competing with a platform on the platform's strongest characteristic - scale - is rarely a winning strategy.
The first effect was market democratisation
The platform economy initially solved a genuine problem.
Digital services used to be expensive and difficult to access.
A small retailer wanting e-commerce might once have needed a developer to build a shopping basket, payment integration, inventory tools, customer accounts and order management. Today, Shopify can provide much of that infrastructure through a subscription.
A photographer once needed a designer to create a portfolio website. Today Squarespace can provide templates, hosting, content management and commerce tools in one system.
A craft business once needed its own website and marketing plan to reach customers nationally. Etsy can provide immediate access to a marketplace where buyers are already searching for products.
A new business once needed design software, stock photography and technical expertise to create promotional material. Envato, Canva-style tools and template marketplaces dramatically lowered the cost.
These changes did not merely reduce prices. They allowed businesses to exist that may never have been viable under the old model.
That is an important benefit and should not be dismissed.
But abundance also changed the perceived value of professional work
The same tools that lowered barriers for customers also lowered barriers for providers.
Template marketplaces made "professional-looking" designs inexpensive. Freelance marketplaces made global labour visible. Website builders simplified production. Social media made it possible to launch a service business without premises or a large advertising budget.
The result was abundance.
Thousands of themes. Thousands of developers. Thousands of logo designers. Thousands of photographers, marketers, copywriters and virtual assistants.
Abundance creates choice, but it also makes services appear increasingly interchangeable.
When buyers see hundreds of providers apparently offering the same result, the easiest characteristic to compare is often price.
A £2,000 professional service then competes visually with a £300 service, a £49-per-month package, a £50 freelance listing and an automated tool promising to produce something similar in minutes.
The products may not actually be equivalent.
But the marketplace presentation can make them look as though they are.
RCT's web-design market shows the process locally
TownConnect explored this topic directly in How Many Web Designers Does One Local Market Need?, our review of the web-design market in Rhondda Cynon Taf.
That study identified at least 19 clearly visible RCT-based web-design providers before counting home-based freelancers with little public directory presence or agencies based elsewhere but actively targeting the area.
At the same time, local buyers can choose national subscription services, DIY builders, offshore freelancers and providers anywhere else in the UK.
Publicly advertised local and regional pricing ranged from around £30 a month at the very low end through one-off packages costing hundreds of pounds and into bespoke projects costing substantially more.
The important point was not that inexpensive websites are inherently bad.
It was that a crowded market makes the headline price increasingly important because many small-business customers have limited ability to judge the less visible differences in technical quality, strategy and long-term support before buying.
Platforms intensify that pressure.
A local provider is no longer competing only with other local providers. They are competing with global software that can package many basic website functions at a cost individual professionals cannot realistically reproduce manually.
The lower end of many professional markets is becoming software
Web design is not unique anymore, at least majority of it. Most of web designers or specialists use templates, design systems (adopted from corporations) - be it Bootstrap, Google's Materialize, IBM's Carbon etc. Use guidelines and make everything look similar, less original, more template driven. This is however topic for another time.
Accounting software automates work once performed manually. Template platforms reduce demand for basic graphic-design tasks. AI tools can create first drafts of copy, generate visual concepts and produce code. Online booking systems replace custom appointment tools. Marketplace logistics replace parts of traditional retail infrastructure.
This does not necessarily eliminate professionals.
It changes where professional value sits.
If a business only needs a standard five-page website containing contact details and photographs, software can increasingly solve much of that problem.
If the business needs complex integration, positioning, research, accessibility, conversion strategy, bespoke development or long-term technical judgement, the software is only part of the solution.
The challenge for professionals is that customers may not understand which problem they actually have until after they have purchased the simpler product.
Social media created a different kind of dependency
Website builders and marketplaces commoditise production. Social media changes distribution.
Facebook and Instagram made it possible for a tiny business to communicate directly with customers without owning a traditional media channel.
That was revolutionary in terms of reach, as Facebook was preloaded on all mobile devices. Not that this communication would not exist prior Facebook - not on this range though.
A cafe could announce an offer instantly. A hairdresser could show recent work. A tradesperson could post photographs from a completed job. A shop could build a community of followers without buying newspaper advertising or maintaining a sophisticated website.
Social media remains extraordinarily important. Ofcom's 2026 adult media research found that 89% of adult UK internet users used at least one social-media platform, rising to 97% among 16–34-year-olds.
Ofcom's Online Nation research also shows just how concentrated online attention has become. In 2025, more than half of all UK online time was spent on services owned by just two companies: Alphabet and Meta. YouTube reached 94% of UK adults, while WhatsApp, Facebook and Google Maps were among the most widely used apps.
For a small business, ignoring those platforms would make little sense.
But relying almost entirely on them creates another problem.
A Facebook page is useful. It is not the same as an owned asset.
A business can invest years building a Facebook audience and Facebook on the scale will be main beneficiary in terms of numbers for investors, reach, charts, etc
It can publish hundreds of posts, collect reviews, respond to messages and become locally recognisable through the platform.
Yet the business does not own the distribution system at all.
Facebook decides how posts are shown. It can change the interface, reduce or increase organic reach, introduce new content formats, prioritise video, alter page functionality or modify advertising products.
Then there is this misconception of a miracle where if something is posted on Facebook, it will become popular by itself. Ignoring other discoverability and classic marketing efforts is needed.
The same principle applies to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and other networks.
A business owns its brand and its original material. It does not own the audience infrastructure through which that material is distributed.
This is sometimes described as building on "rented land". The metaphor is imperfect, but useful.
A tenant can operate successfully from rented premises for decades. Renting is not automatically a bad strategy. The risk comes from believing the tenant controls the property in the same way the owner does.
Owned and rented digital assets should be treated differently
A healthier small-business strategy distinguishes between digital assets the business controls and channels it accesses through somebody else.
More directly controlled assets can include:
- the business's own domain
- its website content
- an email list collected with appropriate consent
- customer records held lawfully by the business
- original photography and brand assets
- first-party analytics and commercial data
- documentation and intellectual property.
Platform-dependent channels include:
- Facebook and Instagram pages
- TikTok accounts
- marketplace profiles
- Google Business Profile
- delivery platforms
- third-party booking systems
- seller accounts on e-commerce marketplaces.
A good digital strategy usually uses both.
The problem begins when almost all of the business's discoverability, customer contact and reputation are concentrated in the second group.
Google is also rented ground - even when it feels essential
Google Business Profile deserves particular attention because it can be extraordinarily valuable to local businesses.
For a plumber, café, garage or shop, Google can display the telephone number, location, opening hours, photographs, reviews and directions before the customer ever visits the business website.
That convenience makes a standalone site seem less necessary.
But Google controls the interface.
Search layouts change. Map results change. AI summaries increasingly answer queries directly. New advertising placements appear. Features are introduced and removed.
A local business should therefore treat Google as an essential discovery channel rather than assume it is a permanent substitute for every asset it might otherwise own.
Marketplaces solve the hardest problem - then become difficult to leave
Etsy, Amazon, eBay and similar marketplaces are compelling because they solve one of the hardest problems in business:
finding customers.
A new online store with its own domain may have no traffic at all. An Etsy seller enters a marketplace where customers are already looking for products.
That has obvious value.
But the marketplace also controls the environment in which the seller competes.
Products are displayed beside competitors. Search rankings are determined by the platform. Fees are controlled by the platform. Advertising products are offered by the platform. Customer expectations become shaped by the standards of the marketplace rather than the economics of the individual seller.
A business can therefore become commercially successful while simultaneously becoming increasingly dependent on one external distribution channel.
Price competition becomes particularly aggressive inside marketplaces
Global marketplaces change expectations because they expose buyers to enormous supply.
Fiverr is an obvious example in professional services. A UK small-business owner searching for logo design, copywriting or web development can compare providers from regions with radically different wage levels and operating costs.
The individual seller may be perfectly competent. The issue is structural rather than personal.
A freelancer in South Wales paying UK housing, tax and business costs cannot always compete sustainably on headline price with a provider working in a very different economy.
The response is usually to differentiate, specialise or move away from highly commoditised work.
If providers instead attempt to compete primarily by reducing price, the market can enter a race in which acceptable professional rates become increasingly difficult to defend.
Templates created the same pressure in creative markets
Envato and ThemeForest demonstrate how dramatically digital assets have been commoditised.
Shutterstock said its 2024 Envato acquisition added around 650,000 subscribers and expanded its library with millions of creative assets, including approximately half a million templates alongside images, video, audio, code and web themes.
This scale is extremely useful to designers and agencies. A template can remove days of unnecessary production work and allow small clients to access a level of visual polish that once required much larger budgets.
But templates also reset customer expectations.
If a professionally designed WordPress theme can be purchased inexpensively, the customer may reasonably ask why a website costs thousands of pounds.
The answer has to lie somewhere beyond the visual template itself.
Research. Structure. Content. Configuration. Technical implementation. Testing. Accessibility. Search strategy. Integration. Maintenance. Commercial judgement.
Professionals who cannot explain that difference become increasingly vulnerable to price comparison.
The platform usually wins the scale game
This is why small businesses should be careful about choosing strategies based primarily on being cheaper than large platforms.
A local shop cannot have Amazon's logistics network.
A local website company cannot match Squarespace's development budget.
An independent seller cannot outspend Etsy or Shopify on national advertising.
A small social-media agency cannot replicate Meta's data infrastructure.
Trying to beat these companies at scale is effectively choosing the area where they possess the greatest structural advantage.
That is the Don Quixote problem in modern digital business: fighting the platform as though it were merely a larger version of the local competitor.
It is not.
The more practical response is to compete on characteristics that scale does not automatically improve.
Local businesses still have advantages large platforms cannot easily reproduce
Small does not automatically mean weak.
A local business can know its customers personally. It can understand a town, a street or an industry in detail. It can adapt quickly. It can take responsibility for an outcome rather than route a customer through a large support system.
A local developer can sit with a business owner and understand how the company actually works. A local retailer can select products specifically for its customer base. A hotel can build direct relationships with returning guests. A tradesperson can develop a reputation that circulates through families and communities over decades.
These are not small advantages.
But they disappear when the business reduces itself to a commodity competing mainly on price.
Owning the customer relationship is becoming strategically important
This may be the central issue.
Businesses often focus on owning a website when the more important objective is owning as much of the customer relationship as reasonably possible.
A hotel receiving every booking through a third-party platform can have excellent occupancy but limited direct contact with the customer before the booking.
A retailer selling entirely through a marketplace may have substantial revenue while depending on that marketplace for discovery.
A café with 10,000 social followers may have impressive reach but no direct email list or independent content archive.
The strongest position is usually not to abandon the platform.
It is to use the platform to create relationships that extend beyond it.
Platforms should be distribution, not identity
This distinction provides a more realistic strategy than advising businesses to leave social media or marketplaces.
Facebook can distribute content.
Google can generate discovery.
Etsy can deliver buyers.
Shopify can provide excellent commerce infrastructure.
Squarespace can provide a perfectly suitable website for many businesses.
The strategic mistake is allowing one tool to become the entire business identity.
A company should ideally remain recognisable and reachable even if one platform becomes less effective.
Shopify shows why the issue is more nuanced than “own versus rent”
Shopify is a useful example because a merchant using Shopify can still operate under its own domain and build a distinctive brand.
This is not the same dependency as selling entirely through a marketplace.
Shopify provides infrastructure, while the business can retain a much more direct customer relationship.
That is why the simplistic advice to “never build on platforms” is not useful.
Modern businesses inevitably depend on external infrastructure: hosting companies, payment processors, cloud services, email providers, software vendors and telecom networks.
Total independence is neither realistic nor desirable.
The goal is resilience.
Can the business change provider if necessary? Can it export its data? Does it control its domain? Can customers find it elsewhere? Does it understand what parts of the customer journey are dependent on one supplier?
Private investment is not automatically a threat - but incentives matter
Large platform ownership can sometimes be discussed as though private equity or institutional capital automatically means customers will lose.
That is too simplistic.
Investment can finance better products, international expansion and infrastructure that small businesses benefit from.
Permira's acquisition of Squarespace, for example, explicitly positioned future product growth and expansion as part of the investment case.
But ownership and incentives still matter because platforms are businesses in their own right.
Their long-term objective is not to preserve a particular small company's preferred workflow forever. They have their own investors, costs, growth targets and strategic priorities.
A feature that is essential to 200 local businesses may be commercially insignificant to a platform serving millions.
Small businesses therefore need contingency rather than suspicion.
Social reach can disappear faster than reputation
There is also an important distinction between reputation and platform visibility.
A local company may have earned trust over twenty years.
Its Facebook reach can change in a week.
Those are different assets.
The danger is allowing a platform metric - followers, likes, marketplace ranking - to become confused with the underlying reputation of the business.
A strong brand should survive a change in algorithm.
That is easier when customers know the business name, can search for it directly and can find a stable independent source of information.
Mobile use makes platforms even more powerful
The growth of mobile internet has strengthened the position of large platforms because smartphones concentrate behaviour inside apps.
Ofcom reports that UK adults now spend around four and a half hours online per day, with most of that time on smartphones and an average of 41 apps used per month.
For local businesses, this means customers are increasingly discovering restaurants, shops and services without consciously visiting “the web” in the traditional desktop sense.
They open Google Maps. They scroll Instagram. They tap a Facebook recommendation. They use a marketplace app.
That makes platform presence essential.
It also makes platform concentration strategically important.
The answer is not to retreat from platforms
A small business refusing to use Google or social media on principle is unlikely to gain an advantage simply because it owns its website.
An invisible owned asset is still invisible.
The practical strategy is to use powerful platforms while avoiding unnecessary dependence on any single one.
That might mean:
- maintaining an independent domain even when social media generates most enquiries
- building an email list alongside social followers
- encouraging direct repeat business where appropriate
- keeping customer and product information exportable
- maintaining more than one meaningful source of discovery
- using marketplaces to acquire customers without allowing them to become the only route to market
- keeping important content somewhere the business controls
- understanding what happens if a subscription or platform relationship ends.
This connects directly to why some businesses give up on websites
TownConnect previously examined the question in Why Are So Many South Wales Businesses Still Operating Without a Website?
One of the reasons businesses remain without websites is that Facebook, Google and other platforms can already provide enough visibility to keep the phone ringing.
That is not irrational.
For some businesses, a sophisticated website may genuinely be a lower priority than maintaining accurate Google information and good customer relationships.
But there is a difference between deciding a simple digital setup is currently sufficient and assuming that the platform providing it will always operate in exactly the same way.
The first is a business decision.
The second is a dependency that may not be visible until circumstances change.
The platform economy also changes local communities
This issue extends beyond individual websites.
When local spending, advertising and customer discovery increasingly pass through global platforms, more of the economic infrastructure connecting businesses and customers sits outside the community itself.
A restaurant can depend on a delivery marketplace. A hotel can depend on a booking platform. A tradesperson can depend on a national lead-generation site. A retailer can depend on Amazon or Etsy. A local professional can depend on Meta advertising.
Those services can create enormous value.
But they also become intermediaries between the local business and local customer.
That is one reason independent discovery infrastructure still matters.
A directory such as TownConnect is itself a platform, and it should be honest about that. The distinction is not that TownConnect exists outside the platform economy. It is that a healthy local digital ecosystem should contain multiple routes through which businesses can be found rather than forcing every relationship through a handful of global systems.
No single directory, social network, marketplace or search engine should be mistaken for the local economy itself.
Market saturation changes behaviour long before a market collapses
The earlier RCT web-design study also illustrates a broader economic lesson.
Saturation does not require every provider to fail.
It can show itself through behaviour.
Prices fall. Packages become more aggressive. Providers bundle more services. Free trials appear. Monthly plans replace upfront fees. Businesses attempt to differentiate through social media activity because technical differentiation is harder to communicate.
Some providers leave. Others specialise. New providers take their place.
The same mechanism appears in marketplaces.
As seller numbers increase, participants compete harder for ranking, reviews, advertising placement and price.
The platform can continue growing while individual sellers experience increasingly difficult economics.
Convenience can hide concentration
The most successful platforms rarely feel like monopolies to the user because they offer enormous choice within the system.
Amazon contains millions of sellers.
Etsy contains enormous numbers of independent makers.
Fiverr contains freelancers across the world.
Shopify supports millions of separate businesses.
Meta hosts countless independent pages and advertisers.
The apparent diversity at the seller level can therefore coexist with concentration at the infrastructure level.
That is not necessarily harmful.
But it is worth understanding.
What should a South Wales small business actually do?
The answer is not particularly dramatic.
Use the platforms that work.
If Instagram brings customers, use Instagram. If Etsy produces sales, use Etsy. If Shopify is the right commerce infrastructure, use Shopify. If Squarespace provides everything the business needs, there may be no reason to replace it simply for ideological purity.
But build something alongside them that remains recognisably yours.
Own the domain.
Keep control of the brand assets.
Understand where customer data is stored.
Create more than one source of discovery.
Build direct relationships where appropriate.
Know what happens if the primary platform changes price, policy or visibility.
And avoid making a commercial strategy that depends entirely on a company whose strategic decisions you cannot influence.
The goal is not independence. It is leverage.
Small businesses will always depend on larger systems.
They depend on banks, telecom networks, payment processors, landlords, utilities, search engines, software companies and transport infrastructure.
The objective is not complete independence.
It is to avoid being unnecessarily trapped.
A business with its own domain, recognisable brand, customer relationships and several routes to market has choices.
A business whose customers, reputation and sales all exist inside one external account has fewer.
That difference is leverage.
The local business that survives may not be the one with the biggest following
The platform economy encourages visible metrics.
Followers. Likes. Reviews. Marketplace ranking. Search position. Advertising reach.
They all matter.
But durable businesses are usually built on less visible assets too: reputation, repeat customers, expertise, financial discipline, intellectual property and relationships.
Digital platforms can amplify those assets.
They should not be allowed to replace them.
The real risk is forgetting who owns what
There is nothing inherently wrong with Squarespace becoming larger, Shopify processing more commerce, Meta dominating attention or marketplaces becoming more efficient.
Those companies have become powerful precisely because their products solve real problems.
The risk lies in the mindset of the business using them.
If a Facebook page is treated as a useful distribution channel, it is an asset.
If it is treated as the only permanent home of the business, it becomes a vulnerability.
If Etsy is used to find customers, it can be enormously valuable.
If the entire business becomes dependent on Etsy continuing to rank, price and present products in the same way forever, the risk changes.
If Shopify provides world-class commerce infrastructure under a business's own brand and domain, it can strengthen ownership rather than weaken it.
The question is therefore not whether a business uses platforms.
Almost every modern business does.
The question is whether the business understands which parts of its commercial future it actually controls.
How TownConnect approached this article
This article combines current UK media-use data, corporate and investor information from major digital platforms, and observations developed through TownConnect's research into local digital businesses and online discovery.
The article does not argue that platforms such as Shopify, Squarespace, Facebook, Etsy or Envato are inherently harmful to small businesses. Each can provide substantial value. The focus is the strategic distinction between using external platforms and becoming overly dependent on a single platform for identity, discovery, customer contact or revenue.
Research and sources
- Ofcom - Online Nation 2025: how the UK goes online
- Ofcom - Adults' Media Use and Attitudes 2026
- UK Government - UK Business Data Survey 2024
- Permira - completion of the $7.2bn Squarespace acquisition
- Shopify Investor Relations - merchant scale and cumulative GMV
- Shopify - Q2 2026 financial results
- Shutterstock - completion of Envato acquisition
- Shutterstock - Envato acquisition consideration and financial information
- TownConnect Journal - How Many Web Designers Does One Local Market Need?
- TownConnect Journal - Why Are So Many South Wales Businesses Still Operating Without a Website?