Three years of reviews

Every marketplace seller has a version of the same sentence, and it is always said in the same flat tone: we cannot leave, we have three years of reviews on there.

Look at what has happened underneath it. The commission moved once. Then the fulfilment rate moved. Then visibility on the search page, which used to be free, quietly became something you pay for, so the seller is now buying the traffic that the ranking was supposed to earn. Margin per order is thinner than it was on the day the store opened, and it has been thinning in small increments that never justified a decision.

Nobody leaves, because leaving means a new page with no history, no reviews and no position, in a category where a customer sorting by rating will never see it.

The reviews are a real asset. They are also a sunk cost. From inside the business the two feel identical, which is the whole problem.

The question that separates them is not what they cost to earn. That money is gone under every option on the table. It is what they would cost to earn again, set beside the fees the store will hand over during the next twelve months to keep standing where it stands.

Sometimes the arithmetic says stay, and the seller can stop arguing with themselves. More often it says something more useful, which is that the choice was never leave or stay. It is how much of next year is spent defending a position the seller rents, and how much is spent building one they own.

The reviews are worth what they would cost to earn again. Everything else about them is a receipt.