The number usually arrives dressed as bad news. A statistic in a newsletter, with a small red arrow next to it. A slide at a trade fair, clicked past while the speaker apologizes for the chart. A captioned post explaining that your own online store is over, that commerce now lives on marketplaces and everything else is a hobby with a checkout button. Behind all three of these sits the same figure: 83.4% of global ecommerce spending now flows through marketplaces, up from 81% two years earlier. It is a big number, and it knows it. Most days it is presented as the end of the discussion.
Continue reading A marketplace does not replace your own online store