The New Marketplace Playbook: How Brands Can Optimize Customer Reach, Acquisition, and Engagement

Marketplaces have become a dominant force in e-commerce. Amazon now surpasses Google as the top place U.S. consumers start their product searches. For brands, that shift creates real opportunity, but also real complexity.

Why marketplaces matter for brand growth

Consumers turn to marketplaces for two reasons: discovery and price. Whether a shopper is exploring new brands or checking if a familiar one offers a better deal, marketplaces influence the path to purchase early and often. Brands that ignore this miss a critical first touchpoint.

Six keys to building your marketplace strategy

1. Experts from CI&T, Kearney, and Acadia outline a practical framework. Start by mapping your customer journey. Understand where your buyers expect to find you before choosing a platform. Then evaluate each marketplace's operating model, including its data policies, fulfillment requirements, and seller rules. Not every platform will be a fit.
2. From there, assess the advertising and brand-building tools each marketplace offers. Robust retail media capabilities, sponsored ads, and targeting options vary widely. Use data to guide your investment decisions, and factor in the full cost of each channel (fixed fees, variable costs, and required ad spend) to judge true profitability.
3. Tailoring experiences to each audience matters too. Consumers in different markets expect different things, from rich product imagery to specific delivery options. Finally, protect your capacity to innovate: allocate 90% of resources to mastering core channels and reserve 10% for testing new approaches.
4. The tax complexity brands often overlook. Running a marketplace creates tax obligations that grow with your seller base. Vertex identifies five key challenges: managing product taxability at scale, supporting seller compliance, determining tax liability across parties, meeting state-specific deadlines, and producing compliant invoices for international VAT requirements. Automation is the practical solution to managing this complexity without slowing growth.
5. DTC and marketplaces work better together. The right approach is rarely either/or. Marketplaces serve convenience- and price-driven shoppers. DTC sites support deeper brand exploration and customer relationships. A blended strategy lets you meet buyers where they are and adjust your mix as your brand evolves.
6. Knowing the risks helps you grow smarter. Marketplace growth comes with trade-offs. Brand reputation, margin pressure, inventory strain, and misaligned metrics are real risks. Tracking the right KPIs, matched to your actual objective (whether that is market share or profitability), makes the difference between growth that compounds and growth that costs you.