Launching a product is relatively easy.
Getting people to actually buy the damn thing is another matter.
When you're trying to break into a market, you aren't just deciding how to market the product. You're deciding where people should encounter it, where they should buy it, how they should learn about it, and how you turn that first purchase into an actual relationship.
That's where an omnichannel strategy comes in.
Here's the breakdown:
Marketplaces: Can help you reach existing demand.
D2C: Can help you buld the brand and own the customer relationship.
Wholesale: Can help you scale distribution.
Marketing: Connects the whole thing.
But to really understand how these pieces work together, let's take a look at each one individually.
These three models get lumped together constantly, but they aren't the same thing.
The simplest way to think about them is to ask: Who is selling the product, where does the transaction happen, and who owns the customer relationship?
What Is D2C?
Direct-to-consumer means the brand sells directly to the customer, usually through its own ecommerce website. The big advantage with a D2C model is control.
You control the customer experience, the brand presentation, the merchandising, the pricing, and, importantly, you own first-party data such as email addresses and other customer information.
That makes D2C particularly valuable for building long-term customer relationships and testing things like messaging, pricing, bundles, offers, landing pages, and product positioning.
But D2C comes with a catch.
Your website does not magically come with an audience.
You have to build the damn audience yourself.
This is where many new brands struggle. It means doing SEO, paid search, social, content, influencers, affiliates, email, PR, partnerships, referrals, or some combination of all of it.
What Is a Marketplace?
A marketplace is a third-party platform where customers are already shopping. Think Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, Etsy, and similar platforms.
The major advantage is existing traffic and purchase intent.
With a marketplace presence, you're putting your product somewhere people are already searching for products like yours.
That makes marketplaces particularly useful when you're trying to validate demand for your product.
In an online marketplace, you can learn:
- Which keywords bring people to the product
- Which benefits resonate
- Which images convert
- What questions customers ask
- What objections appear in reviews
- Which products or SKUs perform best
That's valuable information when you're still figuring out exactly how the market wants to buy your product.
The tradeoff is that you don't own the marketplace relationship in the same way you own your D2C relationship.
You're essentially renting tiny space in someone else's store.
And, as with most things you rent, the landlord makes the rules. They determine product detail page requirements, control the checkout experience, and have access to the platform's first-party customer data.
What Is Wholesale?
Wholesale is a B2B model where one business sells products to another business at a wholesale price. That retailer then sells the product to the end consumer.
The primary advantage is distribution and scale.
A successful wholesale relationship can put your product in front of thousands—or potentially millions—of customers you could never reach through your own website alone.
Similar to marketplaces, it comes with its own set of tradeoffs. Wholesale generally means less control over the customer relationship and lower revenue per unit than selling D2C.
And here's the part that sometimes gets missed:
Getting into a retailer is not the same thing as succeeding in retail.
A retailer can buy 10,000 units from you.
Congratulations.
Now you have to get 10,000 people to buy them.
This is where merchandising strategies and planograms come into play.
There isn't one universally correct channel.
Your product, audience, margins, purchasing behavior, and operational capabilities all matter.
But if you're building a consumer product from relatively early-stage traction, I like the idea of using the channels progressively:
Marketplace → D2C → Wholesale → Omnichannel
Not because every company must follow that exact sequence, but because each stage can give you something useful for the next.
Marketplaces can be an effective place to test whether people actually want your product.
You aren't starting with a completely empty room. You're entering an environment where consumers already have purchase intent.
Take Amazon, for example. No one goes to Amazon to research, How do I start a garden?
They're searching for garden tool set, fertilizer, soil, or nets to keep out rabbits.
So, at this stage, your initial focus should be on the basics:
- Product positioning
- Marketplace SEO
- Product titles and descriptions
- Product imagery
- Feature bullets
- Pricing
- Promotions
- Reviews
- Inventory
- Conversion rate
- Sales velocity
But don't treat the marketplace as simply another place to put your product.
Treat it like a research lab.
Pay attention to what customers are telling you.
What are they searching for?
What benefits keep appearing in reviews?
What questions do they ask?
Which images or videos seem to help conversion?
Which products sell?
Which don't?
What objections keep coming up?
That information can influence your messaging, product positioning, creative, and even future product development.
You're not just trying to make sales.
You're trying to learn.
Here's another reason I like marketplaces early in the process: they can help you build evidence.
When you approach a retailer with a brand-new product, you're asking them to take a risk.
You can tell them your product is fantastic.
You can tell them customers are going to love it.
You can hand them a beautiful pitch deck with a very convincing TAM slide.
Or you can show them that people are already buying the thing.
I'll take the latter.
Marketplace and D2C performance can give you useful proof points such as:
- Revenue
- Unit sales
- Sales growth
- Conversion rates
- Reviews
- Average rating
- Best-selling SKUs
- Customer demographics
- Geographic demand
- Repeat purchases
- Brand search growth
The conversation changes from:
“We think this product will sell.”
to:
“The product is already selling. Here's the data.”
That's considerably more persuasive to a retail buyer.
Here's where I would push back against the idea that a brand should simply live on a marketplace.
Don't put all your eggs in someone else's basket.
While the marketplace is helping you generate sales and learn about your customers, build your own D2C ecosystem.
Your website gives you something the marketplace doesn't: ownership of the brand experience, first-party data, and another revenue-generating platform.
You can control:
- Messaging
- Merchandising
- Pricing
- Bundles
- Offers
- Content
- Customer experience
- Analytics
- Email capture
- Retention
- Cross-selling
- Loyalty
Most importantly, you can build first-party customer data and use it to develop post-purchase strategies that keep the relationship going.
And that's important because the first purchase isn't necessarily where the money is.
The first purchase establishes the relationship.
The second, third, and fourth purchases build loyalty.
Getting someone to buy once is acquisition.
Getting them to come back is good marketing.
Once someone enters your D2C ecosystem, you have opportunities to build that relationship through:
- Welcome emails
- Post-purchase campaigns
- Replenishment reminders
- Cross-sells
- Upsells
- Loyalty programs
- Subscriptions
- Referrals
- Product education
- Personalized recommendations
- Win-back campaigns
For products people purchase repeatedly, retention can become a particularly important part of profitability.
And even when the product isn't consumable, your D2C channel gives you somewhere to educate customers, introduce complementary products, announce new releases, and continue building brand affinity.
There's another advantage to owning your ecommerce environment:
You can experiment.
Want to test a different headline? Do it.
Want to test a bundle? Go for it.
Want to change the product positioning? Test it.
Want to see whether customers respond better to a premium offer or a discount?
There's your experiment.
D2C gives brands a controlled environment where they can test messaging, positioning, pricing, creative, offers, landing pages, bundles, and customer segments more quickly than they often can through traditional retail relationships.
And the more you learn, the better your product marketing becomes.
Once you have evidence that people actually want your product, wholesale becomes a much more interesting conversation.
You're no longer asking a retailer to blindly bet on you.
You can bring data.
“Here's what we're selling.”
“Here's where customers are buying.”
“Here's what they're saying.”
“Here's our fastest-growing SKU.”
“Here's our conversion rate.”
“Here's how demand has grown.”
That's leverage.
Retailers don't simply want good products.
They want products that move.
The stronger the existing demand, the lower the perceived risk for the retailer.
Wholesale sounds hot when you're talking about purchase orders.
The operational side is considerably less sexy.
Before you start chasing major retail distribution, you need confidence in things like:
- Manufacturing
- Product consistency
- Packaging
- UPCs
- Inventory
- Lead times
- Fulfillment
- Wholesale margins
- Retail pricing
- Forecasting
- Returns
- Retailer requirements
A D2C customer buying five units is one thing.
A retailer ordering 50,000 units is another beast entirely.
Operational problems that are manageable at a small scale can become catastrophic once you're dealing with large retail accounts.
So yes, pursue distribution.
Just make sure the product and the supply chain can handle it.
This is one of the biggest distinctions between distribution and marketing.
Getting a retailer to carry your product is distribution.
Getting customers to buy it is marketing.
Once you're in stores, your strategy has to shift toward sell-through.
That can include:
- Shelf placement
- Endcaps
- Displays
- Promotional signage
- Seasonal promotions
- Coupons
- Sampling
- Retail-specific promotions
- Retail media
- Sponsored product placements
- Packaging
- QR codes
The question is no longer:
“How do I get into Target?”
It becomes:
“How do I get into Target and make sure enough people buy the product that Target wants to order more?”
That's a much better question.
Where your product is sold says something about your brand.
A premium retailer communicates something different than a mass-market retailer.
A specialty store communicates something different than a big-box chain.
Distribution isn't merely a logistics decision.
It's a brand decision.
Where customers encounter your product contributes to how they perceive it.
So before chasing every retailer willing to take your product, consider whether the retailer actually makes sense for the brand you're trying to build.
More distribution isn't automatically better distribution.
Retail purchases don't have to be the end of the customer journey.
It can be the beginning of another one.
Packaging and QR codes can connect the physical product to digital experiences such as:
- Product education
- How-to content
- Recipes
- Warranty registration
- Loyalty programs
- Email signup
- Exclusive content
- Reorder pages
- Complementary products
- Brand storytelling
The goal isn't necessarily to yank someone away from the retailer.
It's to give them another way to interact with the brand.
Someone might discover you at a physical store, scan the package, learn more about the product, join your email list, and eventually buy directly from you.
Now you've turned a retail transaction into the beginning of a relationship.
Omnichannel isn't just having an Amazon account, a website, an Instagram page, and a few retail partners.
That's just having a lot of chaos going on.
Omnichannel means those channels actually work together.
A customer might:
See your product from an influencer
↓
Search for it on Amazon
↓
Read the reviews
↓
Visit your website
↓
Join your email list
↓
Eventually buy it at a retail store
↓
Scan the QR code on the package
↓
Join your loyalty program
↓
Buy directly from your website later
From the company's perspective, those are several different channels.
From the customer's perspective?
It's one brand.
That's the point.
If you need the brutally simple version:
Marketplace Is About Customer Reach
Use it to access existing demand, validate the product, collect reviews, and learn what customers want.
D2C Is About Customer Experience Ownership
Use it to build the brand, own more of the customer relationship, collect first-party data, and drive retention.
Wholesale Is About Business Scale
Use it to expand distribution and reach customers you couldn't efficiently reach on your own.
Retail Marketing Is About Product Sell-Through
Use it to make sure getting the product into stores actually results in customers taking it back out of them.
Omnichannel Is an Integration Effect
Connect everything so the channels strengthen one another rather than competing for attention and budget.
You don't need to sell on 14 marketplaces, have a presence in every major retailer, post six times a day on social media, run five paid campaigns, and send your customers seventeen emails a week.
Please don't.
The goal is to figure out where your customer discovers products, where they research them, where they prefer to buy them, and what you can do to make those experiences work together.
Maybe your marketplace presence is where you capture demand.
Your D2C site is where you build the relationship.
Wholesale is where you scale.
Email is where you retain.
Social is where you create awareness.
Search is where you capture intent.
Retail media is where you influence customers while they're already shopping.
Each channel has a job.
Let it do that job well.
The Bottom Line
Breaking into a market with a new product isn't really a question of choosing between D2C, marketplaces, or wholesale.
It's a question of what each channel can do for the business at a particular stage of growth.
Marketplace can help you prove demand.
D2C can help you build the brand and own the customer relationship.
Wholesale can help you scale distribution.
And an omnichannel strategy connects the whole damn thing.
The strongest product brands don't treat these channels as competing strategies.
They build a system where distribution creates awareness, awareness creates demand, demand creates sales, sales create data, and data makes the next marketing decision smarter.
