Target teams up with Shopify to supercharge its marketplace as Big Retail looks to small biz for growth
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Adding to cart… Select Shopify merchants yesterday became eligible to join Target’s exclusive third-party marketplace. Refresher: Target Plus launched in 2019 and has featured 2M+ products and today supports 1.2K selling partners. Target curates the companies allowed to sell through Plus, working on an invite-only basis. Now Target can connect with cos selling products through Shopify’s extensive network of millions of merchants.
Plus perks: Target Plus lets customers shop on a familiar site and offers perks like free shipping on some orders and free returns.
Missed: Target’s total sales have fallen in three of the past four quarters.
Race to the marketplace… Amazon dominates global retail. With nearly 2M active sellers, the Zon made up 80% of marketplace sales last year. FYI: more than 60% of Amazon-store sales involve independent sellers. But rivals are stocking up. As of last fall, Walmart Marketplace had more than doubled in size over the preceding year and a half, reaching 100K+ active sellers. It’s also opened to merchants based in China, Canada, Japan, and the UK. On the newcomer front, TikTok Shop doubled its US merchant base last year, topping 500K+ vendors.
Free-for-all: Some shoppers have grown skeptical of the mega marketplaces offered by Amazon and Walmart, pointing to a flood of knockoff products.
There’s power in numbers… Marketplaces like Target Plus let retailers grow their listed inventory without spending as much of their own $$ (think: paying for products, warehousing, shipping costs). Meantime, they can help sellers reach a bigger audience. US ecommerce sales made through marketplaces are forecast to make up more than a third of retail sales by 2027.