Your Global Sales HQ

There's a version of this article that opens with some tidy analogy, maybe something along the lines of renting vs. owning real estate, or fishing with a net instead of a rod. You've read that version. Probably multiple times, from multiple publications that all somehow arrived at the same three bullet points.

This isn't that.

What actually happens when you talk to sellers who've been at this a while (people running actual operations, dealing with actual margin pressure) is that the "marketplace vs. DTC" question barely comes up anymore. Not because it's been settled. Because most of them have stopped treating it like a choice you make once and defend forever.

The DTC dream got complicated

A few years back, direct-to-consumer selling was having a moment. Brands were cutting out the middleman, owning the customer relationship, building email lists, and telling their story. It felt like the future.

And for some brands, it worked. Like really well.

But somewhere around 2023, the math got ugly. Customer acquisition costs on Meta and Google climbed and climbed. iOS privacy changes gutted targeting. Building traffic to your own site went from "challenging" to "expensive as hell." 

By 2024, the average cost-per-click for Amazon Sponsored Products had risen 14% year-over-year. DTC wasn't immune either, brands that had looked bulletproof were slowly bleeding out.

The DTC unicorns people had been celebrating? Some of them tumbled. Hard.

This doesn't mean DTC eCommerce is broken. It means the version of it that depended on cheap paid traffic was always fragile, and the bill eventually came due. The brands that survived, and the ones growing right now, are the ones that didn't bet everything on a single channel.

What marketplace selling actually gets you?

Here's what people underestimate about marketplace selling: the traffic is already there. You're not building from zero.

When someone opens Amazon or Walmart and searches for what you sell, they're not browsing, they're ready to buy. High purchase intent, built-in trust, reviews, fast shipping expectations already set. You plug in, list your product, and you have immediate access to tens of millions of shoppers. No SEO campaign. No six-month content strategy.

Brands selling on major marketplaces averaged 40% year-over-year growth in 2024, with some surpassing 200% or even 300% across platforms like Macy's, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and Saks. That's not a rounding error. The audience is genuinely massive.

But, and this is the part that doesn't show up in the pitch decks, by 2022, Amazon's cut of seller sales had surpassed 50% in the form of fees and advertising, up from about one-third back in 2016. That's a real number. Half your sale. Before you've paid for the product, or shipping, or anything else.

In 2024, Amazon earned more than $150 billion in revenue from the fees it charges sellers, up 7% from the prior year. They're going up in 2026 too.

So marketplaces give you reach and volume. They extract a serious toll for it. And they own the customer: their name, email, purchase history. Not yours. If that customer buys from you again, they'll search Amazon first. Not your site. You don't get to email them. You don't get to build a relationship. You're basically borrowing their attention.

What DTC actually gets you?

The flip side is real too.

When someone buys from your own store, you get their data. Their email. Their buying patterns. You can build a loyalty program. You can run a post-purchase flow. You can retarget them on social. Over time, the lifetime value of a customer you actually own is usually higher, sometimes much higher, than what you'd get from a marketplace buyer who might never think of your brand name again.

Email and SMS marketing deliver roughly $36 ROI for every dollar spent, but only if you have the list. And you only build that list when customers come through your own online selling platform, not through Amazon.

There's also the brand story element. On a marketplace, you get a listing. Some photos, a title, bullet points. On your own site, you control everything: the photography, the copy, the narrative, the experience of landing on a page that feels like your brand, not a generic product grid.

The problem is getting people there in the first place. Traffic doesn't build itself. And right now, paid acquisition is expensive enough that a lot of brands feel like they're running on a treadmill… spending more and more to maintain the same revenue. That's not sustainable.

Why the either/or framing is the wrong question

Here's something that gets lost in most of these comparisons: the two channels aren't really competing with each other for the same customer.

Marketplace buyers are often mission-driven. They know what they want, they're comparing options, and they're probably going to buy today. DTC buyers tend to be warmer; they found you through content, or social, or a referral. They're more likely to become repeat customers, to care about your brand beyond just the product.

So running both isn't redundant. It's reaching two different buyer mindsets at two different stages.

Use marketplaces to validate product demand, pricing sensitivity, and buyer behavior. Direct repeat customers to your DTC site for personalized offers and loyalty perks. That's the actual playbook a lot of experienced operators run. The marketplace is the top of the funnel… discovery, volume, proof. The owned channel is where retention and margin improvement happen.

When multichannel eCommerce is done right, you’re just playing to each channel’s strengths instead of treating them all the same.

The operational problem nobody talks about enough

Here's the part that kills brands before the channel strategy even gets to play out: operations.

Running one channel is hard enough. Running two or three, each with different listing formats, different inventory rules, different fulfillment requirements, different fee structures, without losing your mind, requires either a very organized team or tools that actually keep everything in sync.

Most sellers cobble something together. A spreadsheet here, a third-party tool there, someone manually updating quantities after every order. It works until it doesn't. An oversell on one channel. A listing that goes live with wrong pricing. Inventory sitting in the wrong place because nobody updated the count in time.

This is where platforms like MySellingHub show up in conversations sellers actually have with each other. It operates as a unified commerce OS, one place where inventory syncs across channels, listings can be mapped without rebuilding from scratch, and supplier coordination isn't buried in some parallel Slack thread. 

The MSH AI Predictions tool handles cross-channel item matching and supplier-to-channel product mapping, which sounds simple until you're doing it manually before a product launch. Built-in MSH Chat and MSH Mail mean team communication doesn't get split across six apps. MSH Assistant manages account-level tasks and can surface optimization suggestions without someone needing to manually pull reports.

The point isn't the feature list. It's that a real eCommerce channel strategy eventually runs into operational capacity as the limiting factor, and that's what kills the multichannel vision for most sellers before it pays off.

The brands that are actually winning right now

They're not the ones who went all-in on marketplaces and prayed the fees wouldn't eat them alive. And they're not the pure-DTC brands that burned through cash on Meta ads waiting for a loyal customer base to materialize.

The ones doing well tend to treat marketplace presence as their discovery engine - high visibility, low barrier, high volume. And they treat their own store as the relationship layer. That's where they build email lists, run loyalty programs, test new products with real customers, and make the economics actually work long-term.

The global direct-to-consumer market is supposed to grow from about $225.5 billion in 2024 to $880.1 billion by 2034. That growth isn't happening in a vacuum; it's happening alongside marketplace growth, not instead of it. The sellers positioned for that future are building both channels now, while they still have time to do it intentionally.

So what's actually worth doing here

If you're still primarily on one channel (whatever that is), the question isn't really "should I add the other one." It's more like: what is it actively costing you to not have it?

Marketplace-only and every customer you acquire belongs to the platform. Your CAC might look fine. But you're building on rented land, and the rent keeps going up. You have no list. No retention lever. No fallback when an algorithm shifts or a fee structure changes. And they do… constantly.

DTC-only and you're probably spending more on acquisition than feels comfortable, and your volume ceiling is basically your ad budget. Adding marketplace presence could bring in buyers you'd never reach otherwise. Without having to outbid someone for every click.

Neither works as a complete eCommerce channel strategy on its own. That's not an opinion. It's what the economics keep showing.

The sellers building durable businesses right now are the ones using both channels deliberately (each for what it's actually good at) and the ones who got their operations tight enough to handle the complexity without it eating all their time. Less exposed when fees spike. Less dependent on any single platform's mood. Not bulletproof, but a lot harder to knock over.

That's it, really. No grand conclusion. Just the pattern that keeps showing up.

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