Amazon is unquestionably the biggest sales platform in the North American market, and its marketplace alone commanded nearly a third of total online sales in the U.S. in 2018. But there’s also a lot of competition—more than 5 million brands compete for the same customers, with thousands more joining every day.
The gulf between industry policy and the practical realities of the market creates vulnerabilities and opens the door for new threats like friendly fraud and cyber shoplifting. Visa and Mastercard are stepping up to take this challenge seriously. But is it enough? What’s really needed is a consistent process across card brands.
Are unauthorized third-party sellers a big deal? If you want to protect the integrity of your brand – not to mention your margins – the answer is yes. In the era of online reviews and SEO, the impact of unauthorized ecommerce sellers ranges from lost revenue to damaged relationships with authorized sellers to questionable brand integrity.
Alibaba is changing up its fast-growing AliExpress marketplace to attract merchant sellers from nations besides China, a direct challenge to Amazon’s international marketplace, according to the Financial Times. The “local to global” program will initially admit sellers from Russia, Turkey, Italy and Spain, expanding as it goes.
As ecommerce takes a greater share of retail sales, the view into relative channel strength has been somewhat opaque. But Nordstrom recently began reporting ecommerce as a percentage of net sales, not just a growth percentage. Tune in to the latest MCM CommerceChat podcast to hear more on this interesting development.
