DTC

Direct to consumer: selling straight to end customers through your own channel, without retailers or marketplaces in between.

DTC means you own the whole pipe: your site, your checkout, your customer data, your margins. The alternative routes, Amazon, app stores, retail shelves, each take 15 to 30 percent of revenue and own the customer relationship, the reviews, the browsing data, the repeat purchase. Selling direct trades built-in distribution for control and a better unit economics once traffic exists.

Why it matters to an indie builder: most indie software is DTC by default, and understanding that label clarifies what you have signed up for: nobody brings you customers. Your site must rank, your ads must convert, your emails must retain. In exchange, a $29 sale is $29, not $20.30 after a marketplace cut, and the customer email list, the asset that compounds, belongs to you.

A concrete example: a designer selling notion-style templates. Marketplace route: a platform takes 20 percent, owns the customer, and a buyer of one template never hears from you again. DTC route: a storefront, Stripe checkout and an email capture offering one free template. Margin recovers instantly, and the list becomes the actual product: a monthly newsletter to 4,000 subscribers launches each new template to first-day sales the marketplace never generated. The 20 percent fee was never the real cost; the missing relationship was.

Common mistakes: going DTC with zero distribution plan, the storefront without traffic is a museum, underpricing to match marketplaces while keeping none of their traffic advantages, ignoring the operational load you just absorbed, support, refunds, tax handling, which the merchant-of-record blocks on IndieBoot exist to absorb, and treating the email list as optional rather than the core asset the model runs on. The b2c and b2b entries flank this one; the billing blocks cover the checkout layer.