The Top Marketplace Issues for Brands: Insights from Pattern’s Sundance Forum

Pattern’s Executive Acceleration Forums (EAF) bring together top brand leaders to network and discuss all things ecommerce. At our most recent event, hosted at the famous Sundance Resort in Utah, a few key themes surfaced as common issues most brands are facing that hinder their growth and hold them back from achieving true ecommerce success.

As a global marketplace expert and ecommerce accelerator working with hundreds of brands, Pattern hears these and similar difficulties time and time again. We know that that there is a solution. The difference between success and failure is having the right data, resources, and experts on your side, truly invested in helping you achieve your goals.

Wondering if your ecommerce struggles align with what we’re seeing? Learn what’s keeping most brand executives up at night.

Dealing with Limited Talent and Resources

We hear this pain time and time again at Pattern, and our Executive Acceleration Forum attendees recently agreed—they’re under-resourced to deal with the challenges of succeeding on digital marketplaces. It takes a lot of cross-functional teams and manpower to manage customer reviews, logistics, forecasting, unauthorized sellers, returns, and price erosion. And that’s only scratching the surface of the complexities many brands face.

Most ecommerce teams are small—less than 10 people and sometimes just 1 person— and don’t have the bandwidth to become an expert in all of these areas. So, brands are turning to accelerators and agencies to fill in the gaps. The key is choosing a partner with all of the capabilities you need that’s truly invested in helping you win and grow on your digital marketplaces.

Growing Revenue on Marketplaces

The more crowded atmospheres of marketplaces like Amazon are making it increasingly difficult for many brands to stand out and capture market share. Without the right data to understand their growth levers, they’re unable to keep up with category expansion—they’re slowing down, rather than increasing sales.

With better insight into the levers that are truly affecting their performance, brands like Sylvania are finding ways to grow past their category growth and improve profitability. It all comes down to optimization in four key areas: traffic, conversion, price, and availability.

Achieving Marketplace Control

As your products find their way into leaky distribution channels and, ultimately, the hands of non compliant sellers, online consumers are interacting with your goods in ways that don’t represent who you really are. This leads to price erosion online, a crumbling reputation with consumers, poor reviews, and even a decrease in leverage with brick and mortar distributors.

At Pattern, we call this the profitability death spiral. It’s a path that’s inevitable for any brand who can’t control their brand and pricing on ecommerce channels. In a fascinating presentation, VORYs law firm walked through the steps needed to achieve control on digital marketplaces, from how to identify rogue sellers to establishing brand consistencies globally.

International Growing Pains

Our forum executives were also eager to learn about taking their brand to marketplaces around the world. Growing globally is no small feat, however. Without experience in the region, cultural competency, logistics in place, or the resources to compete, brands can struggle with failure to launch, wasting funds and unintentionally causing future issues.

EAF executive attendees all struggled with aligning their international teams and magnifying their global expansion efforts. We discussed that, to really start strong and grow well, it takes regional experts who are able to scale growth, sufficient resources dedicated to creating and executing a great strategy, and a pre-established logistics structure to make global scaling easy.

Accelerate Your Marketplace Success with Pattern

It’s easy to look at these common brand issues and feel discouraged. The problems are significant, and, in our experience, fairly universal. The good news? Each of these issues are solvable with the right support.

Pattern is the premier ecommerce accelerator that invests in and partners with brands on all global marketplaces to tackle exhaustive ecommerce problems. Our unique approach places data and technology at the core of our strategy, supported by proven teams and processes that know how to boost your performance wherever you sell.

Let’s solve your ecommerce issues together. Call us today.