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- Snapshot: eTail Insights surveyed marketplace and ecommerce leaders for Mastering the marketplace in retail and ecommerce to benchmark marketplace trends including what’s working, what’s breaking, and where budgets are going next.
Why it matters: These benchmarks show how marketplace teams describe their day-to-day reality right now.
- Listing optimization no longer separates anyone. In the survey, every team rates its listing optimization capability as good or better, which tells you where the “easy wins” have already been harvested.
Why it matters: Listings may look “done,” but they stop being the lever that moves growth.
- Retailer and brand teams lose time and margin on coordination. Inventory coordination across platforms ranks as the top challenge at 40%, followed by marketplace data integration at 33%.
Why it matters: When systems disagree, the fallout lands in fulfillment, customer service, and returns.
- Leaders are budgeting for trust optimization above all else. Over the next 12 months, the top investment is customer service and review management systems at 51%, ahead of marketplace advertising and content expansion at 46%. This makes sense, as credibility optimization is key to meeting both customers’ and agentic shopping tools’ high standards.
Why it matters: Teams are funding the places where customers notice problems first and where reputations change fastest.
- Profit pressure is shaping the stack. Competitive and dynamic pricing tools sit close behind at 41%, a signal that fees and price competition are forcing sharper math.
Why it matters: If teams can’t see the true cost per order, pricing tools can push them into underpricing.
- Marketplaces are moving from “channel” to “center of gravity.” 81% expect marketplace sales to become more important to overall strategy, and 73% expect that shift within the next year.
Why it matters: Marketplace execution is becoming core operations, not an add-on project.
A customer adds a refrigerator water filter to their cart. They’ve bought the brand before, and everything looks familiar. One click from paying, they pause. The model name is close, but not identical. The customer taps the chat bubble in the corner of the screen to make sure they’re purchasing the right part.
That bubble used to connect them to a live agent. Now it’s often an AI assistant, trained to answer product questions quickly, so the shopper doesn’t abandon checkout.
“Is this the filter for model X?”
The assistant replies instantly: “yes, it’s compatible.”
But it’s not.
The filter fits a similar model with a near-identical name. The product listing doesn’t clearly distinguish the two, so the AI fills in the gap with the most plausible-sounding answer. The customer buys anyway. The filter arrives, doesn’t fit, and gets returned.
The return reason isn’t “wrong model.” It’s “defective.” The frustration isn’t just with the product. It’s with the guidance the shopper trusted.
This is the kind of mistake customers try to avoid. When it happens anyway, they don’t blame the model, they blame the seller. Marketplaces penalize getting it “almost right” with returns, bad reviews, and support costs. The warning appears in performance long before you see it on a dashboard.
The new marketplace problem: the storefront that moves faster than operations
Most organizations aren’t dabbling in marketplaces anymore. Nearly everyone sells on Amazon. Most also sell on Walmart.com, according to eTail’s Mastering the marketplace in retail and ecommerce report.
But while most respondents say their marketplaces strategy is at least somewhat effective for revenue, there is a deeper problem. Each marketplace comes with its own rules and requirements. Retailers and brands don’t describe their biggest marketplace challenges as “getting listed” (the industry has evolved past that point). They describe them as keeping platforms aligned.
Inventory coordination across platforms ranks as the top challenge at 40%. Marketplace data integration follows at 33%.
Those aren’t minor headaches. They sit underneath the moments customers remember: the delivery promise that never was, the unwelcomed out-of-stock surprise, the placement part that “should have worked,” or the one-star review that deters others from buying your product.
Meanwhile, marketplace importance keeps rising. 81% say marketplaces will become more important to overall strategy, and 73% expect that shift to happen within twelve months. So, as opportunity grows, the friction grows along with it.
Where marketplace execution starts to separate teams
Listing optimization is not the weak point: every respondent rates their listings as good or better. But when everyone feels strong in the same area, it is no longer a competitive advantage. Instead, the advantage shifts to what’s more difficult to keep consistent at scale, such as inventory accuracy, data consistency, review health, margin control, and service quality.
It also moves to the places where organizations admit weakness. In this case, one-third rate “review and reputation management” as fair or poor.
That gap matters because reviews aren’t just social proof. They shape ranking, conversion, and what shoppers learn before they buy. They also feed the summaries shoppers increasingly rely on, whether that’s a marketplace recap, a review highlight, or an AI-style shopping assistant answer. A shopper who doubts your listing doesn’t read your FAQ. They read your reviews.
Marketplaces reward speed, but trust decides who keeps the sale
Marketplaces raise expectations without lowering complexity. Shoppers expect quick answers, fast shipping, and painless resolution even when the catalog and fulfillment reality are messy.
Trust decides whether a retailer or brand keeps the sale. On marketplaces, customers judge trust through what happens when something goes wrong and what other buyers say happened to them. That’s why the report’s investment priorities matter. Leaders are investing in customer service and review management systems at 51% over the next year, ahead of advertising and content expansion at 46%.
Competitive and dynamic pricing tools follow close behind at 41%, underscoring how quickly the fees and shifting costs can erode margins. Teams don’t lead with service systems unless service continues to break.
The catalog is the experience now
The story of a mismatched water filter isn’t really about AI. It’s about what happens when product information fails under pressure and gets repeated across channels.
Marketplaces have always punished unclear product information, but the old failure mode looked different. A customer read the listing, guessed, and learned the truth when the package arrived.
Now the failure happens earlier. Customers ask questions mid-journey and even when the catalog is incomplete or inconsistent, the assistant still answers. When two SKUs look nearly identical, the assistant still picks one. When variation structure is messy, the assistant still tries to resolve it. If your product data leaves room for interpretation, the assistant will fill it, and you will own the consequences.
What breaks first when teams scale marketplaces
Most marketplace failures don’t start with a dramatic crash. Then one day, someone notices reviews shifting in tone. Support tickets spiking. Returns rising. A marketplace rep flags an issue. A finance team sees margin slip and can’t tie it to one decision.
Coordination can be the biggest bottleneck. Inventory coordination and marketplace data integration top the list. If you can’t keep systems aligned, you can’t keep promises aligned.
Three shifts that make marketplace growth easier to scale
Most teams don’t need a radical reinvention. They need to tighten the parts that create expensive downstream effects.
These three easy shifts map directly to what leaders say is slowing them down.
1) Treat inventory coordination like a revenue problem
Inventory coordination across platforms ranks as the top marketplace challenge. This sits at the center of marketplace performance.
When inventory is wrong, you don’t just lose a sale. You lose ranking and trust. You waste customer support time. You pay for returns. You create reviews that never should have existed.
Start by making your inventory view boring and reliable. Establish one source of truth for what’s sellable. Push that truth to every platform on a cadence you can defend.
That shift prevents the “invisible losses” teams learn to tolerate, including cancellations, refunds, angry reviews, and time spent explaining mistakes.
2) Treat review management as a system, not a reaction
One-third of survey respondents rate “review and reputation management” as fair or poor. That’s one-third of teams saying they still treat reviews reactively—and know that it’s hurting them.
Reviews deserve a better approach because they aren’t random. They’re patterns.
A shopper complains that the filter “didn’t work.” Another says the product “felt defective.” A third says the listing “misled them.” The issue is expectation.
Route review themes back to the source. If customers keep confusing models, fix the variation structure. If customers misunderstand compatibility, tighten attributes. If customers misread product claims, update bullet copy.
When review management becomes a loop instead of a fire drill, you stop treating bad reviews as a cost of doing business.
3) Align marketplace data before you scale ads
Marketplace data integration ranks as the second-biggest challenge at 33%, and it’s easy to underestimate how costly those integration speed bumps become once you push harder on growth levers.
Incomplete integration creates quiet inconsistencies: price mismatches, delayed updates, missing attributes, inventory errors that propagate across systems.
Then advertising scales and performance doesn’t follow. You spend more to acquire customers you can’t keep, and you blame the campaign when the problem lived upstream.
Tighten the data path before you scale spend. Your future self will thank you in fewer support tickets and cleaner margin.
Where AI fits without hijacking your strategy
AI can help marketplace teams move faster. It can spot inconsistencies, flag missing fields, draft content variants, and speed up service workflows.
It cannot rescue messy foundations. Give it incomplete data and it produces confident answers built on gaps. That’s why product truth has become a performance lever: AI increases the speed of both accuracy and error.
What mastering the marketplace looks like in 2026
Most teams feel good about listings. The report shows the friction elsewhere: inventory coordination, marketplace data integration, and review management. That’s why next year’s spend tilts toward customer service and review systems ahead of content and advertising.
Marketplace growth requires consistency. Keep one version of the product true across platforms: what it is, whether it’s available, what it costs after fees, and what the customer should expect. The report shows why this is hard at scale. Inventory coordination ranks as the top challenge at 40%, followed by marketplace data integration at 33%. When those basics slip, the cost surfaces as returns, heavier support volume, and reviews that live on the listing.
Talk to our teamMicah McGuire is Senior Product Marketer, Brands, at Rithum.
