Although department stores are having a hard time on the high street, their online equivalent, the marketplace, is going from strength to strength. Whether it’s Asos in fashion, Wayfair in furnishings or Amazon just about everywhere, a marketplace that puts many brands under one roof will attract far more traffic than one retailer’s store could ever do. With the right listing and price, a brand can shift a lot of units on these sites.
The obvious downside is that a marketplace will take a cut of anywhere between 10% and 30% on each sale. But the retailer will also have little control over how their brand is presented by a third-party site, which could be recommending complementary purchases from a competitor, for instance. And, crucially, the customer relationship is owned by the marketplace, no one else.
We have sold direct to consumers since then, but it’s marketplaces that have given us reach