The trade is reach now against the customer relationship later. It is worth making in some categories and not in others.
Most marketplace decisions are made as though they were about distribution. There is demand over there, we are not in front of it, so we should list. The revenue arrives quickly, the numbers look right for two or three quarters, and the decision is treated as settled. What has actually happened is that the business has traded a relationship for a transaction, and the cost of that trade does not appear for years.
On a marketplace you do not own the customer, the search result, the price comparison or the terms. You do not learn who bought, what else they looked at, or why they came back. You gain reach that would have taken a decade to build, and you give up the data that would have told you what to build next. That is not automatically a bad trade. It is simply not the trade most boards think they are making.
Whether it is worth it turns on the category rather than the brand. Where the purchase is considered, the basket is large and the customer expects to return, owning the relationship pays for itself and the marketplace is a leak. Where the purchase is small, infrequent and price-led, the relationship was never going to be worth much and the reach is close to free money. Most businesses have both kinds of product on the same list and treat them identically.
The second question is what the marketplace does to your own site. Once a customer can buy the same product two clicks away with a delivery promise you cannot match, your site stops being a shop and starts being a brochure. That is survivable if you plan for it, and it changes what the site is for: the full range, the product that needs explaining, the service that cannot be commoditised, and the reason to join something rather than buy something. It is not survivable if you keep running the site as though it were still the main door.
So the decision is not whether to list. It is which products to list, what the site is for once you have, and what you will do with the reach while you have it. Brands that came out of this well used the marketplace to be found and their own channel to be remembered. Brands that came out badly listed everything, watched their own traffic fall, and discovered that the thing they had been renting was the customer.
