E-Commerce Marketplace Aggregators Are Hot On Thrasio’s Heels As Companies Raise $2.3B

Said differently, if your business is standalone e-commerce selling third-party brands, good luck. You can’t generate enough operating profit to scale beyond getting noticed, counter-attacked, and at best acquired.

While the first wave may be third-party seller rollups, the next wave could be software companies that power them. And more ancillary markets will come out of all this.

Brick-and-mortar grocers have built in geographical demand, but online grocers must pay “rent” to Google, Facebook and other top-of-funnel acquisition tools—and that rent tends to rise over time

Data and analytics mattered much more online than having a great team of human merchants. There was a great story in the “Everything Store” about how the algorithms outperformed the human editors that Amazon employed in their book section. A culture of relentless A/B testing and data driven decision making was essential to online success.