When buyers and sellers who met on a platform take their relationship off it to deal directly and avoid fees, cutting out the middleman.
Disintermediation is a mouthful for a simple move: two people meet on a marketplace, hit it off, and then take the next job off-platform to skip the fees. The buyer saves the markup, the seller keeps more, and the platform gets nothing — which is why marketplaces fight it hard with rules, communication limits, and penalties.
For sellers, disintermediation is tempting precisely because platform fees are high — every dollar of take rate is a reason to go direct. But on many platforms it’s against the rules and risky: you lose buyer protection, dispute support, and payment guarantees, and you can get banned. The honest tension is that heavy fees create the very incentive to leave.
For buyers, going off-platform to save a little can cost you a lot — the protections, escrow, and recourse that made the deal feel safe usually vanish the moment you transact privately.
Here’s the twist: disintermediation only makes sense when the take rate is high enough to justify the risk. A commission-free model removes the incentive entirely — there’s nothing to save by leaving. That reframes the whole marketplace vs own website decision and the two-sided marketplace dynamic.