When talk turns to omnichannel versus multichannel, there can be an urge to change the channel. Brands looking to scale need to find a way out of the labyrinth of disconnected sales channels, and for inspiration, companies can look to the giants of retail and eCommerce.
Highly interconnected and interoperable ecosystems that start at sourcing and don’t end until after-purchase follow up are how Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Walmart and other titans got big. Lacking their enterprise resources, small brands need easier ways to access that kind of muscle.
eCommerce-as-a-Service (ECaaS) seeks to provide enterprise-grade connected commerce capabilities to smaller brands, and Cart.com CEO and co-founder Omair Tariq sees it as an imperative now as trends that took shape during the pandemic become the “new normal.”
With a nod to the eCommerce giants, Tariq told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, “They own the entire technological stack, and as a result, they own the entire operational stack. The journey of their end consumers is massively impacted by it.”
Few young brands have the resources to make deliberate infrastructure investments for years on end, he said.
The result?
“The only way a brand can access a fully interconnected digital and physical infrastructure is by selling through a marketplace like Amazon,” he said. “However, on Amazon, they can’t be a brand. They don’t have control of their end consumer.”
Conceding that marketplaces have the eyeballs, he said, “Cart.com invests millions of dollars on behalf of [small] brands by interconnecting that entire vertical infrastructure so that brands can then have more control of their end consumers, just like Wayfair or Home Depot or Target.”
See also: Cart.com Adds $240M in New Funding
Fixing the Big Disconnect
Tariq noted that brands don’t usually encounter scale issues until they’ve hit $3 million to $5 million in annual sales. After that, they stand or fall based as much on experience as on product.
At that crucial threshold, they’re confronted today with the need for clear data visibility, greater back-office and marketing support and information flows that are a tough climb.
“In the past, a typical retailer [would be] selling stuff in stores, then they realize that their consumers want to buy stuff online, so they open up an online store,” Tariq said. “The online store is not connected to their retail store, and you try to match, but it doesn’t. Then, they realize that they should also be selling on a marketplace, so they open a marketplace store, and now all three channels are disconnected.”
That flies in the face of connected economy seamlessness, compounding complex issues and creating “massive disappointment because the consumer wants to experience unification.”
It’s more ordeal than order at that point, which explains millions of abandoned shopping carts.
Aiming to radically simplify this, Cart.com brings its multichannel management platform to bear, giving small growing brands critical capabilities and insights without ceding their customer relationships to marketplaces and diluting brand power before it has a chance to blossom.
Sometimes, this mastering of omnichannel for small brands means adding another channel.
“If you have a product around which you can build a brand, or if you can build some affinity with customers, then you will sell more of it on the direct-to-consumer [D2C] side just by virtue of having smarter marketing than you would on the marketplace side,” Tariq said.
With hundreds of lookalike brands on every marketplace, opening a D2C channel adds to the omnichannel management load, but it also affords important new connections.
Related: Cart.com Buys SellerActive to Boost eCommerce Solutions
Selling Everywhere and Anywhere
Although his business is helping brands diversify sales channels for scale and sales optimization, Tariq is a fan of the big marketplaces — but he sees them as part of the strategic mix, not a be-all.
“Amazon has done something incredible that has never been done before,” he told Webster. “They’ve made the whole process of buying so easy that consumers have now gotten addicted to not the product, but the ease of buying that product. That’s amazing.
“That’s value that needs to be unlocked, and every brand in the world that has the ability to do it should be selling on all these different marketplaces. It’s incremental sales for them.”
His caveat is total marketplace reliance. That’s straight selling; it’s not brand-building.
This applies to online as it does physical retail — a channel that Tariq feels will need to transform more as eCommerce convenience and predictability become too hard to resist.
“The future belongs to whoever is going to have the least amount of friction in enabling commerce. That could mean a lot of different things,” he said. “That could mean a very easy checkout process online and in stores. It could also mean having product where and when you want it.”
Nourished with $240 million in new equity and debt funding closed in early February, Tariq said the company will double down on its core “commerce everywhere” mission.
“We are very, very strong believers that it’s not just about selling not on marketplace,” he said. “You should everywhere and anywhere you can, and we will enable that.”
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