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This time of year, marketplace leaders are all asking the same question: how do we scale? The answers usually revolve around supply, selection, and seller acquisition. Neel Grover, CEO of ShopSimon, asks something else. He starts with deciding what must stay protected as the marketplace grows, then builds backward. “This is my fifth marketplace that I’ve done over the last two decades,” Neel said at the Rithum LIVE event in New York. “I’ve been in the marketplace business literally for 20 years now and wanted to do some things differently.”
ShopSimon reflects those choices. ShopSimon is Simon Property Group’s digital marketplace for premium and luxury sale-priced products, with “guaranteed authenticity” and savings of up to 85% across fashion, handbags, shoes, beauty, and home. It lists more than 1 million products across thousands of brands, including Nike, adidas, Hugo Boss, and Puma. The business stays curated by design. It avoids buy box mechanics that pull marketplaces toward commoditization. It shares customer data with brands under specific conditions. And it treats Simon’s physical footprint as a fulfillment and discovery network with real operational demands, not a backdrop for brand storytelling.
“We don’t really drive to a buy box,” Neel said. “We’re much more of a brand marketplace, and so we want brands to control the experience.”
Neel has run marketplaces with thousands of sellers. “Whereas when I ran Buy and Rakuten, we had over 7,000 brands on our marketplace. Here we have about 450 today,” Neel said. That smaller footprint is intentional. ShopSimon stays selective by design, prioritizing a brand-controlled experience rather than buy box dynamics.
Seller count looks like strategy until it changes behavior
Seller count shows up in nearly every marketplace board deck because it’s easy to chart and hard to argue with. It changes how sellers compete and how the marketplace enforces standards. Price competition intensifies. Merchandising gets noisy. The customer experience begins to reflect the marketplace’s internal incentives rather than the brand’s intent.
Neel has seen what happens when selection grows without guardrails, so he intentionally keeps ShopSimon selection tight. “We’re very curated,” Neel said. “We’re very selective on who can come on.”
Curation protects the marketplace from the dynamics that turn premium brands into interchangeable inventory. It tells brands the marketplace won’t treat them like interchangeable listings, even as it grows.
That tradeoff surfaced repeatedly during our conversation at Rithum LIVE. Scale is easy to measure, but brand trust depends on choices that limit it.
For retailers building a marketplace, Neel’s approach forces an early decision. A marketplace can maximize selection, or it can protect an environment that brands trust enough to invest in. But it rarely does both well at the same time.
That decision becomes real when retailers decide what the marketplace will enforce to protect brands, including:
- Protect pricing behavior and merchandising consistency, even when sellers push for exceptions.
- Give brands clear ownership of their experience on the site.
- Make explicit what the marketplace will prioritize, especially as it grows.
Neel acknowledged the tension that still exists in a curated model. Multi-brand sellers and distributors can surface lower prices and create brand friction. ShopSimon responds with posture and enforcement, not performative rhetoric. “We really want to be as true as we can to the brands,” Neel said.
Brand trust starts with policy, not positioning
Brands have heard every partnership pitch. They pay attention when a marketplace describes a rule set, especially around customer data.
Neel framed ShopSimon’s approach as conditional collaboration, not open-ended generosity. “If a brand is exclusive with us in certain areas, we’ll actually share our customer data,” Neel said. “So, you can remarket back that customer back to your own website. To us that is true collaboration.”
What stood out to me was how explicit the exchange is. Data sharing isn’t implied. It’s tied directly to exclusivity and collaboration, with a clear, practical benefit for brands.
When brands evaluate marketplaces, Neel recommends a filter that starts with adjacency, not distribution volume. “Is this marketplace I’m looking at going to put my brand in a good light? Is it adjacent to how I want to be?”
For brands, the best decision criteria rarely fit into a single dashboard metric. They come down to fit, context, and customer overlap.
According to Neel, brands can best evaluate marketplaces by asking:
- Does this environment strengthen how we want customers to see us?
- Do we respect the brands we’ll sit next to?
- Does the customer base align with where we want to grow?
- Does the marketplace offer a real differentiator beyond another listing surface?
BOPIS exposes whether a marketplace can operate in the real world
Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) is where marketplace strategy collides with store reality. Neel built ShopSimon with a clear intent to connect online demand to Simon’s physical footprint. “We all agreed we could do things very differently,” Neel said, pointing to the ability to “tie into the 2 billion in store visits that happen in the malls and in the stores.”
That ambition turned into a concrete initiative: buy online, pick up in store at a brand’s own location, launched by a marketplace. “We’re the first marketplace to launch buy online, pick up in store at your brand store,” Neel said.
He also described why the hardest part doesn’t live in the integration layer. The hardest part lives in the store. “Operationally there are challenges,” Neel said. “The brand now has to train their employees to be able to not only handle their own BOPIS, but BOPIS through orders that come through us, which is not inconsequential.”
ShopSimon’s framing of stores cuts through the usual omnichannel abstraction. “To me, those are little micro hubs and micro fulfillment centers,” Neel said.
This store integration functions as a competitive moat. Software-only marketplaces can onboard sellers quickly and expand selection without taking on operational complexity. A marketplace that wants to route demand into stores must earn that capability through store workflows, training, inventory visibility, and service expectations. When the system works, it unlocks speed, proximity, and convenience that customers value. When it fails, it fails in public, at the counter, in front of customers.
What stands out in Neel’s approach is that discipline often creates complexity rather than removing it. Curation requires enforcement. Data sharing requires clear rules. Store-based fulfillment requires systems that can reconcile marketplace orders with store operations in real time. These aren’t conceptual challenges. They’re execution problems, and they’re where marketplace strategies often stall.
I’ve seen the same thing with retailers. The strategy isn’t the hard part. The hard part is building the operating model that can hold up once orders, inventory, and store teams are all in the mix.
The ShopSimon team is working on lighter-touch capabilities that reduce friction for brands and store teams while expanding what customers can do with store inventory. “We are now looking at adding capabilities that will be even lighter touch on a brand side,” Neel said.
Discovery works best when brands treat distribution as portfolio management
Commerce leaders talk about discovery as a macro shift. Brands experience it as pressure to distribute widely.
Neel takes a measured view. He believes brands benefit from broader product presence as discovery behavior evolves, but he also believes brands should resist the temptation to over-distribute and dilute control. “Getting a subset of your catalog out there so it can be discovered on other sites,” Neel said. “I’m not saying you have to have your whole catalog out there.”
This distribution strategy treats marketplaces as differentiated surfaces with distinct audiences. Brands can choose whether to list the same subset everywhere or tailor assortment based on the customer base of each marketplace. “It may be really good for a subset of your products,” Neel said.
He also pointed to why differentiation matters. “We’re deeply integrated into Simon,” he said, describing a “very large loyalty program” launching together.
Marketplaces increasingly resemble each other on the surface. Brands will gravitate toward the ones that offer distinctive mechanics, clearer governance, and meaningful customer access.
Cannibalization usually starts as a leadership decision
Marketplace conversations often drift into cannibalization, as if the marketplace itself is the risk. Neel’s experience suggests a different diagnosis: organizations create cannibalization when they structure teams to compete.
He has moved businesses from owned inventory to hybrid models and marketplace-first models. “We had to move from what I’d call an owned model to a marketplace model or a hybrid model,” he said.
He described how internal competition showed up early. “There wasn’t a wholesale or owned inventory and a marketplace team, and it was competitive,” he said.
He solved it by changing incentives. “I just ended up incentivizing the team on the overall sales of those products,” he said.
That move aligns the organization around customer experience instead of channel politics. “At the end of the day you want to drive what’s going to be the best customer experience,” Neel said.
Then he offered the line that should reset internal debates. “The customer doesn’t know if it’s wholesale or dropship or marketplace,” he said. “They don’t really care. They just want the product.”
What serious marketplaces will prioritize next
Neel didn’t frame ShopSimon as a marketplace that wins through volume. He framed it as a marketplace that wins through decisions other platforms avoid. It curates seller participation even when scale would be easier. It refuses to optimize around buy box mechanics even when price competition would drive short-term conversion. It treats customer data as a governed asset and offers brands a path to access it through clear collaboration. It invests in store-based fulfillment even though stores introduce training, labor, and process complexity.
He also made clear why he took the role after spending two decades building marketplaces elsewhere. “I wasn’t looking to do another marketplace,” he said. “We all agreed we could do things very differently.” For leaders who already understand marketplace mechanics, the takeaway is practical. Strategy begins with what you most need to protect, not what you can add. Smart constraints can help keep a marketplace consistent as it grows.
Learn how Rithum supports marketplace operations teams.
Talk to our teamBlaine Nielsen serves as President, Retail at Rithum.
