In the past years, online shopping swept the entire world off its feet, having a glamorous quality to it and masterfully rivaling with actual, brick-and-mortar shopping. However, for some retailers it is an entirely different story, since they are not always experiencing success in that department.

Naturally, the retail world evolved to face these challenges resulting in many small- and medium-sized businesses giving up on investing in their storefronts. Instead they prefer choosing a marketplace, a third-party seller that has the market coverage and power to reach a customer base that they couldn’t otherwise reach. Great examples on the American and worldwide markets are mega-retailers such as Walmart, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.

So any company that has decided to list its products on a marketplace will not have to go through cumbersome online advertising in order to be pushed forward on Google’s search results, but benefit instead from high-traffic together with the hosting marketplace. Even though it may seem like an entirely advantageous deal, the retailers involved in this will have to comply with the technology requirements and business processes of these large chains. By adhering to these compliances, the retailers will basically become suppliers, adding a selling-oriented side to their business.

These marketplace suppliers still need to do a part of the heavy lifting, such as to update pricing information electronically and to upload their product catalogs electronically, while at the same time to receive purchase orders electronically and to provide updated information on inventory availability. On top of all this, these new suppliers need to be able to provide status updates for the shipments involved.

This is only part of the increasing trend of retailers wanting to reach a larger portion of the market, resorting thus to marketing their very own label brands through other retailers. Another factor in this emerging trend is the fervent international expansion, that is driving chains to license their brand names to foreign ones in up-and-coming markets like Middle East. This will determine retailers to develop that selling-oriented side to their business, becoming more and more complex.