Marketplaces

Prime Day may be an Amazon.com event, but its impact is no longer confined to the online retail giant. It’s become a market-wide retail moment that reshapes what consumers buy, where they buy it, and what they expect to pay — creating new challenges and opportunities for brands across every channel. Despite record-breaking sales during…

Amazon.com says it has cut off Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on its marketplace on behalf of customers, after attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience. The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn’t tell…

A wireless earbuds seller based in Shenzhen, China has a cool product everybody wants, manufacturing capacity to produce it at scale, and strong home market demand. Now it wants to sell to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. To do that, the seller must navigate local tax and compliance requirements, manage intricate cross-border logistics and customs,…

Marketplaces have spent a decade making participation intuitive and inviting. Sellers can list products or services in minutes and get paid quickly. Buyers can tap to check out, implicitly trusting the underlying platforms’ purchasing processes and technologies. However, with consumer and seller expectations for speed and emerging automation developments, exactly who (or what) is transacting…

In episode 515 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, a certified B Corp online book retailer supporting independent bookstores. Listen in as Hunter explains the book retailer's mission and revenue-sharing marketplace model (0:47), his career journey that led to launching Bookshop.org (2:40), and what's driven its…

The big summer sale season kicked off with a bang this year, with Amazon electing to move its annual summer promotion from July to June. This tactical shift meant that Amazon Prime Day, Walmart Deals, and Target Circle Deal Days overlapped during the last week of June, creating one of the most competitive promotional periods…

Nike is planning to cut off thousands of online distributors in China beginning in January as the sneaker giant looks to clean up what’s become a messy digital marketplace and get the region back to growth, the company said Tuesday. Starting next year, Nike’s online footprint will shift primarily to the retailer’s official website and…

DoorDash on Tuesday announced a first-of-its-kind integration that gives independent Shopify retailers a direct, seamless path to integrate with the delivery service through the tools they already use every day. DoorDash is now available as a native sales channel inside Shopify's App Store. This means any Shopify merchants with a brick-and-mortar presence in the U.S.…

When people talk about the future of American consumer brands, the conversation usually swings between two poles. On one end are the giants: the multinational companies with scale, shelf dominance, and balance sheets built to absorb almost any shock. On the other are the insurgents: the digital-native startups with fresh branding, niche audiences, and venture-backed…

U.S. retailers drove $26.4 billion in online spend during Amazon Prime Day (June 23-26), representing 9.3 percent year-over-year (YoY) growth. Sales outpaced Adobe’s initial forecast of $26.3 billion. Amazon Prime Day and its accompanying shopping events at competitive retailers is changing the shape of the summer shopping season, which is beginning to rival the holiday period. As…