As I’ve previously discussed, the importance of individual brands diminish on aggregator e-commerce platforms. It’s challenging to build a strong brand on Amazon because Amazon itself is the brand that consumers trust, and brands become secondary to signals like reviews and sort order. The antidote for brands is to leverage platforms that allow for... See more

Our current platform era is really built on the back of self-serve advertising. The Top 5 largest advertising businesses are all built on self-serve revenue

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.

And then — especially in the business press — because it furthered the narrative that even the hugest of consumer goods companies, long stuck in codependent relationships with the hugest of retailers, would start trying to sell more of their products direct.