Most brands treat a marketplace as a threat to their own webshop: a competitor for the same sale. That instinct is understandable, but it costs revenue. Because while you are weighing up two channels against each other, half of all shoppers are already starting their search on a marketplace rather than on a brand’s own site. The question is not which channel wins, but whether your brand is the answer on both.
A webshop and a marketplace serve different functions with the same goal: growing your brand. Bring the two together under one strategy and you not only sell more, you also build brand preference among people you would otherwise never have reached. Play them off against each other and you lose on both.
Cannibalisation is usually an assumption, not an outcome
The fear is a familiar one: put your range on a marketplace and you will sell there what you would otherwise have sold in your own webshop. For most brands, that turns out to be barely true. A marketplace captures a different moment in the customer journey, with visitors who are often still comparing and who do not yet know your brand.
Think back to physical retail. You never fought your own retailers over who got the sale. You wanted to sell, and you wanted the brand to grow. In that respect a marketplace is no different: it is distribution, with the difference that you keep control of it yourself.
Half of all searches start somewhere else
Roughly half of all shoppers start their search for a product on a marketplace instead of on a brand’s own site. That figure changes the question. You are not choosing whether to be present on a marketplace; you are choosing whether to be visible at the moment someone is still orienting.
That moment is becoming more important too. 60.8% of all European e-commerce revenue now goes through marketplaces, while the share of brands’ own webshops is falling. And the biggest referrer to Bol, the largest Dutch marketplace, is now AI: almost 40% of referral traffic comes from ChatGPT and other chatbots. The shelf is no longer an end point, but a place where orientation begins.
Different functions, the same goal
Your own webshop is where you tell the full brand story, where the margin is highest and where you own the customer relationship. A marketplace is where reach and purchase intent are already present, and where you are found by people who were not looking for you.
Those are not competing roles, they are complementary ones. The skill lies in turning a customer who arrives through a marketplace into a fan of your brand, and then serving that customer through the channel they already trust. That is something other than putting your range somewhere and hoping it sells. The difference is control: who decides which product sits where, at what price and with what story attached.
What that looks like in practice
Samsøe Samsøe launched its Summer in the City capsule collection exclusively across all of Zalando’s markets. Not instead of its own channels, but alongside them. A full brand story, womenswear and menswear, brought to a wider audience without the brand compromising on who it is.
That is exactly what channel orchestration means: the same brand, the same message, played out where the audience actually is. The exclusivity was in the collection, not in the channel. That way the launch strengthens the brand’s own channels instead of eating into them.
Orchestration starts with your product data
Rolling a brand out across several marketplaces sounds like a matter of connecting up. In practice, every platform uses its own category structures, content guidelines, image requirements and product specifications. Without a single central source for your product data, that complexity comes at the cost of your visibility, and therefore of your sales.
That is where Follo’s work for brands sits: managing product data centrally and translating it automatically into whatever each platform asks for, so that expanding to a new marketplace is not a project of months. The same data also feeds your Shopping feed and your visibility in AI answers, because those systems all read from the same source.
The brands that win won’t pick a side
The coming years will not be won by brands that choose between their webshop and the marketplaces. They will be won by brands that build one brand across every channel their customer actually shops. Not competing, but complementing.
How is your brand splitting attention between its own channels and marketplaces right now? Curious how visible your brand is? Get in touch with us.
