The Age Of Merchant Independence
Small and medium-sized (SMB) online retailers today are faced with a tough choice: Surrender control and leave their fate in the hands of Amazon or some other mass-marketplace, or maintain control by connecting directly with customers on their own websites, where the experience is controlled, personalized, curated and likelier to lead to a lasting buyer-seller relationship.
Recently, this choice has been made easier as an ecosystem of digital tools and advertising products has developed around an “extreme outsourcing” e-commerce model. This network of service providers includes a range of infinitely scalable e-commerce infrastructure, tools and supply chain access that put even the smallest merchants on equal footing as larger operations.
With activity centered on the tech haven of San Francisco, California and the logistics hub of Salt Lake City, Utah, companies such as Bergen Logistics handle shipping and warehousing tasks, Shopify enables storefront creation and transactional capabilities, while firms such as GearLaunch house all such services on one, cloud-based platform.
As a result of this shift, independent merchants own a large portion of annual e-commerce growth that might otherwise belong to the biggest online retailers. New services and platforms have enabled an online Main Street, populated with small digital storefronts and have rehumanized what had become a sterile and undifferentiated online shopping experience. The mega online retailers offer homogeneity and commoditization throughout their endless catalogues, algorithmically connecting buyers to staple goods rather than offering ways for unique products to stand out.
The world of Amazon makes it difficult for the vast majority of sellers to develop any sort of meaningful personal experience or connection with the consumer. Leveraging recent developments in social advertising and audience-targeting tools, merchants can drive high-value traffic to their own proprietary sites, making the product listing capabilities of central destination marketplaces secondary in driving value. Many of today’s best retail companies list products on the mega e-commerce marketplaces as a sales augmentation strategy rather than a primary sales strategy.
The e-commerce playing field has been leveled. Merchants anywhere can establish storefronts on the Main Street of the world — the web — with just a few clicks of effort. The independent merchant sites of today replicate the experience of old world brick-and-mortar shopping, luring buyers into storefronts and closely conversing with them about their needs. The merchant’s primary job, as it has been for centuries, is to show buyers why specific goods they present will enhance their lives in clear and meaningful ways and help buyers transact on the spot.
Each merchant’s competitive advantage lies in the uniqueness and relevance of products they offer, their ability to target the right buyers for those products and the strategies they use to maximize the value of each customer and maintain customer relationships.
