How other people's marketplaces are delivering online success for Lands' End

As well as direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce, recent years have seen an uptick in the number of retailers choosing to place their brand on third-party online marketplaces to increase their reach.

There was some interesting research out of the UK recently from Product Experience specialist Akeneo that found that online marketplaces dominate almost every stage of the purchase journey, particularly for higher-value spend.

Nearly a quarter of shoppers polled (24%) said they regularly use marketplaces for search and discovery, 26% use them for price and promotions comparisons, 28% use them to compare or validate products and, crucially, 30% use marketplaces to actually buy products.

That’s all important strategic validations of the third-party marketplace model, argues Romain Fouache, CEO at Akeneo, as well as a warning to laggards:

If your product information and brand story do not show up clearly and consistently on marketplaces, you are invisible for a big share ...