Terms of Trade · Edition 2: The trading pack
Marketplace
Definition
A third-party platform, Amazon being the largest, on which a brand sells its products to the platform’s customers, paying a commission on each sale and, increasingly, for advertising and fulfilment on top. The customer relationship, the data and the pricing environment belong to the platform.
Field note
A marketplace is a discount-driven, retail-media-fuelled channel where your customers disconnect from you, but which still somehow seems like incremental revenue.
Board question
What is the contribution margin on marketplace sales after commission, advertising and fulfilment fees, and how many of those customers can we contact?
Applied through
Channel Resilience in the Cat’s Whiskers, reach that is not fragile; Customer Truth asks whose customer the marketplace buyer actually is.
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