Retail & Ecommerce
Marketing for retailers, online and on the high street
Retail runs on margin, inventory and a marketplace that is simultaneously your largest sales channel and your most aggressive competitor. That combination sets the boundaries for everything marketing can usefully do.
The category
What these businesses have in common
Retail marketing is judged differently from almost everything else on this site. In most categories more enquiries is straightforwardly good; in retail, more orders at the wrong cost is a slower way of losing money.
The pressure comes from three directions at once. Margins are thin and largely fixed by suppliers, acquisition costs on the main paid platforms have risen for years, and the biggest marketplaces compete with their own sellers for the same searches.
What follows is written for operators who already know that, and who want the marketing conversation to start with contribution margin rather than with a traffic chart.
Where they split
And where a single strategy stops working
These differences are the reason the pages below are written separately rather than as one page with the business type swapped out.
- The cost structures are not comparable. A store carries rent, fitting and staff against local footfall; a pure-play carries warehousing, shipping and returns against national or international reach. The same order value produces different profit, so the same acquisition cost is affordable in one and ruinous in the other.
- The search behaviour splits cleanly. Physical retail lives and dies on local intent, opening hours and stock visibility; online retail competes on product and category terms against marketplaces with far more authority than any individual brand.
- The customer relationship is owned in one model and rented in the other. A direct online brand can build a list, measure repeat purchase and market to it; a retailer whose sales run through a marketplace usually cannot contact the person who bought from them.
- Replenishable categories and considered one-off purchases behave nothing alike. One is a retention business where email and subscription decide profitability; the other is an acquisition business where every sale has to be won again from scratch.
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal