Launching a product is relatively easy.
Getting people to actually buy the thing is another matter.
When you're trying to break into a market, you're not just picking a marketing channel. You're deciding where people first encounter your product, where they buy it, how they learn about it, and how you turn that first sale into an actual relationship instead of a one-off transaction.
That's really what an omnichannel strategy is about. Marketplaces help you reach demand that already exists. D2C helps you build the brand and own the customer relationship. Wholesale helps you scale distribution. And marketing is the thread that ties all three together.
Let's look at each one on its own before getting into how they fit together.
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 (D2C) means the brand sells directly to the customer, usually through its own ecommerce website. The big advantage of 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.
All that ownership means you also own getting shoppers to your site. This is where many new brands struggle. You need to bring people there through 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.
If you're a small business owner selling lamps, for example, you might sign up for an Amazon Seller Central account and add your new awesome cordless lamp to Amazon.
The major advantage is existing traffic and purchase intent. You're putting your product somewhere people are already searching for products like yours, including that awesome cordless lamp you created.
That makes marketplaces particularly useful when you're trying to validate demand for a product.
On an online marketplace, you can learn:
- Which keywords bring people to the product
- 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 a tiny digital 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.
That can take something away from the brand experience and limit your ability to market to the customer later. The email address a customer uses to make a purchase belongs to the landlord (marketplace), not you.
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 - which is great, but 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.
Let me explain.
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.
While the marketplace is helping you generate sales and learn about your customers, build your own D2C ecosystem – if you don't have one already.
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 after the first ecommerce sale, 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 asking.”
"Here's the 'How-to' content to answer them."
“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 your operations are up to par and your supply chain can handle it. The fastest way to ruin a wholesale relationship is to cancel large orders or consistently miss ship-by windows. These aren't small mistakes when you're dealing with a major retail account. They can cost you the relationship.
The Bottom Line
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.
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.
