From Chaos to Brand Control: Maximizing Profitable Ecommerce Growth

Online marketplaces have revolutionized ecommerce by connecting brands to millions of customers worldwide, creating a tremendous opportunity across revenue and scale. But with this reach also comes great risks: unauthorized sellers, counterfeit products, and inconsistent pricing, all of which can harm your brand’s reputation and profitability. As marketplace sales continue to dominate ecommerce revenue streams, maintaining brand control has become essential to avoid these threats and ensure sustainable growth. Yet, many brands underestimate the importance of enforcing these preventable measures, leaving them vulnerable to lost sales, diminished equity, and negative customer experiences.

• Unauthorized sellers account for up to 20-30% of total sales on marketplaces like Amazon, often eroding brand value and pricing integrity.
• A single star drop in product ratings can reduce sales by 5-9%, demonstrating how unauthorized sellers and poor-quality control directly impact revenue.
• Brands without Buy Box control on Amazon experience an average of 35% lower ROI on advertising spend, as ads often drive traffic to listings they don’t own.

This article offers insights into the critical importance of brand control in fostering a thriving and expanding business. Whether your brand has previously overlooked the need for asserting control over online sales, has authorized multiple sellers on marketplaces, or is struggling with unauthorized resellers, we will explore how taking control can significantly enhance your online business.

What Is Brand Control?  

Brand control involves brands exerting authority over their distribution channels, marketplace selling strategy, and unauthorized sellers of their products. This ensures optimized sales and preserves brand value. The increasing prominence of open online marketplaces has made brand control an essential strategy. These marketplaces allow anyone to list a brand's products, which can disrupt both marketplace and omnichannel go-to-market strategies. Counterfeiters and other malicious actors continually engage in illicit activities on these platforms, posing additional risks to both brands and consumers. The consequences of lacking control in today's interconnected omni-channel world are profound - impacting sales, branding, and customer relationships.

Consequences of Insufficient Brand Control  

When brands lack control over their marketplace presence, it creates a ripple effect of challenges that compromise both their marketplace and broader omnichannel success. Open platforms like Amazon allow anyone to sell products, often sourced through undesirable means such as arbitrage, diversion, or liquidation. This leads to a proliferation of unauthorized resellers, diluting brand value, impeding sales-driving strategies, and eroding advertised prices. A crowded marketplace encourages a race to the bottom on pricing, undermining efforts to enforce Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) programs and compromising brand integrity.

This chaos extends to inventory management, where multiple sellers competing for the Buy Box generate volatile demand signals. This instability results in frequent out-of-stock situations, missed sales, and dissatisfied customers, as well as overstocked inventory that leads to liquidations and strained seller relationships. Advertising efficiency also suffers as Buy Box disruptions waste ad spend and dilute campaign effectiveness, further stalling growth. Combined with poor quality controls and unreliable customer service from unauthorized sellers, brands face increased negative reviews, which harm their reputation, category rankings, and sales.

These marketplace issues inevitably bleed into other sales channels, creating widespread challenges. Channel conflict arises as traditional distributors and retailers lose confidence due to inconsistent advertised pricing, jeopardizing partnerships, and brick-and-mortar sales. Showrooming customers purchase cheaper marketplace options, devaluing physical investments like displays and knowledgeable sales staff. Strained relationships with channel partners often result in chargebacks, margin guarantees, or reduced shelf space, putting long-term partnerships at risk. These cascading effects lead to diminishing profitability across all channels, trapping brands in a cycle of erosion that undermines their overall financial performance.

The Power of Brand Control

Now, let’s flip this scenario and explore the possibilities that arise when a brand exercises control over its online sales. Brands can establish a valuable partnership with a dedicated ecommerce acceleration expert, empowering significant sales growth on marketplaces while safeguarding brand integrity. With this level of control, the brand can confidently invest in advertising and employ other marketplace sales growth tactics, knowing that it will not drive traffic to unauthorized sellers and experience subpar returns on marketing investment.  

By stabilizing its presence on marketplaces, the brand can prevent disruptions to its brick-and-mortar channels, sparing customers from the negative impact of uncommitted, low-quality resellers that erode brand value. This approach ensures profitability and fosters strong customer relationships across core business channels.

• Enables increased marketing spend with optimal effectiveness and low interruption. Without it, a brand is unable to spend at optimal levels, rendering some tactics unavailable and ineffective.  
• With keyword-based performance enhancements, minimal content changes, and consistent product descriptions, improved organic win rates are achieved.  
• Efficient allocation of advertising dollars and minimal disruption result from brand control, ensuring optimal effectiveness and low interruption.  
• Avoid ROI erosion caused by offsite ads leading to competing sellers or unauthorized resellers' product detail pages.  
• Consistently delivering optimized content, improving accuracy and attribution, building conversion confidence, and ensuring customer journey security.  
• Improved advertised price compliance leads to better margins, reduced channel conflict, and avoidance of chargebacks or Prime renegotiations, maximizing pricing and profitability.  
• Brand consistency facilitates successful expansion into new channels, allowing effective brand representation by 3P partners like Spreetail.  
• By implementing brand control, businesses can drive more traffic, increase profitable sales growth, and establish a strong presence on marketplaces.

How Does My Brand Get More Control?  

Brand control requires that brands make an enterprise-level commitment, aligning sales, ecommerce, and legal teams to this common goal: having 95% of marketplace sales made by their authorized seller. This is what unlocks acceleration.  

Next, brands must understand that they cannot take a fragmented approach to brand control – that is, they should not try to leverage various internal and external resources to achieve this goal. Many brands make the mistake of relying on a patchwork of existing brand protection vendors, MAP monitoring vendors, time-constrained internal resources, traditional law firms or ecommerce agencies. As shown below, these approaches are rarely successful because they invariably fail to bring forward all the capabilities needed to ensure that the brand’s authorized seller consistently wins most sales.  

Instead, brands in need of greater control should partner with a holistic brand control solution provider that can provide brands with the requisite legal foundation, tech stack, investigative capabilities, brand protection services, reseller compliance capabilities, and enforcement services needed to truly achieve brand control in today’s omni-channel environment. This is a highly specialized area.

• Strategic Alignment: Aligning sales, ecommerce, and legal leadership to the control goal and associated KPI (95% of sales owned by the authorized seller) and the brand’s custom blueprint for achieving this goal. Brands should aim to complete this step within 30 days.  
• Monitoring & Data: Brands then need to implement the right technology stack that informs them of all sellers of their products and the volumes and revenues being accomplished by each seller. This allows brands to understand their current landscape, the financial ROI associated with greater control, where the brand’s product leaks are occurring, and enables the brand to direct its enforcement efforts against the right sellers at the right time to ensure that the authorized sales KPI can be consistently driven forward.  
• Authorized and Unauthorized Seller Legal Foundations: Designing, preparing, and implementing the necessary foundation that empowers brands to have the necessary policies and procedures in place that enable appropriate channel control over authorized sellers and the legal ability to enforce against and remove unauthorized sellers. Brands should aim to have their policies prepared, approved, and implemented in 60 days.  
• Reseller compliance management: Next the brands need to leverage data, tools, and specialized professionals to consistently monitor and manage their resellers to ensure compliance with the brand’s policies.  
• Enforcement: Brands must also be able to perform necessary enforcement work against authorized customers selling in unapproved channels, unauthorized sellers that obtain a brand’s products and sell them in an unapproved and disruptive manner on online marketplaces, as well as any counterfeiters or other IP (Intellectual Property) violators that are impacting the brands strategy. All enforcement initiatives need to be managed so that the brand is constantly pushing the authorized sales KPI rather than some commercially meaningless vanity metric like the number of sites monitored or takedowns made.  
• KPI Tracking and Iteration: Finally, the brand should be regularly monitoring the sales owned by its authorized seller in its quest to reach the 95% threshold and iterate strategies as needed considering the ground realities and the constantly shifting landscape.

Brand Control in Action

Case Study: Yakima  

Since June 2024, Yakima's enforcement efforts have resulted in the removal of 45 out of 61 (73.8%) targeted Amazon storefronts involved in unauthorized sales of Yakima products. During this time, authorized Buy Box control increased from 78% to 89%. Among the removed sellers were the three most disruptive by revenue, collectively accounting for over $105K in unauthorized sales from the start of enforcement to their removal. Overall, sellers representing more than $156K in unauthorized revenue were eliminated, contributing to a 4% reduction in unauthorized Buy Box control.  

A significant milestone included securing the permanent cessation of active Yakima product sales by the most disruptive seller, represented by sophisticated legal counsel. Additionally, this seller agreed to disclose its overseas sourcing channels, enabling Yakima to address cross-border product leakage effectively.  

Establishing greater control over your online marketplace sales unlocks improved business outcomes for your brand. Given the importance of brand control to ecommerce acceleration, Spreetail partners with a third-party company and funds brand control cleanup for our brand partners. Together we can drive significant growth and success in the online marketplace landscape.