How Manufacturers and Wholesale Brands Need To Think About New eCommerce Channels
Any wholesale brand wondering how it can grow faster by adding an eCommerce revenue stream (either by marketplace or d2c) has a few obstacles to overcome:
Likely the brand's existing customers are trading on the brand's behalf on Amazon, perhaps even in FBA/Prime. There is a long and painful journey ahead to clean this up.
Existing fulfillment centers are almost certainly ill-equipped to ship eaches, much less to deliver on a 2-day (or better) promise.
eCommerce team is getting low-quality product information, and likely not going to be a lot of help from their "partners" in the Sales organization to build it out further.
With any large catalog, even assessing which pockets of SKUs to start with is a big challenge. Never mind the fact that SKU-level forecasting needs to be learned to help the warehouse predict their labor calendars!
Calculating SKU-level margin by channel is likely a new endeavor, because there are so many new costs the organization has never had to account for before.
The brand's data infrastructure? Likely in the dark ages. Can't make decisions unless they start with data.
All of this needs executive alignment or the eCommerce team needs a strong leader able to call in favors.
