Member Exclusive  //   October 22, 2026

Big-Box Briefing: How brands are juggling new marketplaces this holiday season

By Anna Hensel
Ivy Liu

This is the latest installment of the Big-Box Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the strategies of major retailers. More from the series →

‘Tis the season for new sales channels. 

As more brick-and-mortar retailers launch their own third-party marketplaces, brands have more paths than ever before to reach new customers, but also new systems to master.

While Amazon remains the go-to place for most brands that want to sell through a third-party marketplace, Walmart’s marketplace has been showing promising growth signs. The retail giant said its third-party marketplace grew close to 50% year over year during the quarter ending April 30, its fastest growth rate in years, according to Marketplace Pulse. Target, meanwhile, is putting more focus on recruiting brands to Target Plus, hoping to turn its marketplace into a $5 billion business by 2030. 

Some brick-and-mortar retailers are also having to learn the ropes of marketplaces, with Best Buy, Sephora and Ulta launching on TikTok Shop this year. 

Success on marketplaces, especially during a busy sales season like the fourth quarter, mainly comes down to inventory management to avoid running out of stock at crucial moments, brands and agencies said. It also means working with each marketplace to understand its promotional strategies and how they square with the margins a brand needs to hit. 

“Part of it is working with each channel, seeing what the opportunities are, and then kind of figuring out a plan,” said Monil Kothari, founder of jewelry brand Haus of Brilliance. Until about 2021, Haus of Brilliance relied heavily on Amazon. Though Amazon still accounts for about 15-20% of Haus of Brilliance’s business, Kothari has diversified in recent years and now sells through Target and Costco, among other marketplaces. 

“There’s just a sheer amount of logistics” involved with launching on a new marketplace, said Elizabeth Marsten, vp of innovation and growth for commerce media at Tinuiti. First of all, there’s the returns aspect: “The business of returns is this massive cost that we don’t talk enough about,” she said. Second, there are the fulfillment times. Each marketplace likely has its own shipping-level agreement dictating how fast a brand needs to ship products to customers.

With the exception of Walmart and Amazon, most marketplaces still don’t offer their own fulfillment services.

A five- or six-day shipping agreement is fine for a brand that has its own warehouse. But if a brand doesn’t “or only has, like, like one warehouse and needs to have East Coast distribution,” then the brand might need to find additional 3PLs to work with as it adds more marketplaces. “That’s when the economics of a marketplace can start to get challenging,” she said. 

Kothari said Haus of Brilliance’s secret sauce is that it was built for multi-channel. When the brand launched in 2019, it sold through Amazon and also dropshipped through Overstock. 

“Having a really good operational foundation goes such a long way, especially when you have two-day ship times and incredible volume,” he said. “We might have 10 units of a piece on Black Friday — nine might sell, and if your inventory doesn’t update and reflect that it’s now one, it shows another 10 units available. … Our systems move very fast.” 

Kothari joked that much of Haus of Brilliance relies on “duct tape” to connect various inventory management systems. 

“We have some off-the-shelf products — our core ERP is off-the-shelf, but they offer a lot of extendability. Then we work with some third parties for the EDI channels, and then in-house we built API connections to some of our channels to manage inventory and order fulfillment,” he said.

Similarly, CJ Bilangino, CEO of home goods brand Gorilla Commerce, said one of the company’s strengths is inventory management. Gorilla Commerce, known for its Gorilla Grip slip-resistant bath mat, launched on Amazon in 2014. Two years ago, it launched on Walmart’s marketplace, and then in July, it launched its bath mats in more than 2,600 Walmart stores. 

Maintaining proper inventory levels is a bit of a “Goldilocks situation,” Bilangino said. If a company uses Amazon or Walmart’s fulfillment services, they risk incurring excess storage fees if they have too much product. But, if they have too little, they risk running out of product during key moments. 

“We spend a lot of time really trying to understand demand, and then making sure that not only do we have the right amount of inventory in that particular channel at any given point, … but we also create staged opportunities through warehousing.” That means working with a network of 3PLs and staging inventory near Walmart and Amazon warehouses, so “if all of a sudden we see things are trending a lot faster during the holidays, we can quickly go and get that inventory to a distribution center at Amazon or Walmart to quickly flow it through,” Bilangino said.

As a brand that sells a lot of everyday household essentials — in addition to bath mats, Gorilla Grip sells other products like door mats, dog food bowls, cheese graters and can openers — Bilangino acknowledged that the fourth quarter isn’t a big sales period for Gorilla Grip. He said the company’s sales “are pretty consistent month to month,” and the company may only select a few products to offer at a “light discount” during Black Friday.

“It’s very rare that you would see a very deep discount, like 30% or more on one of our products.” But he said the company does see a “halo effect” from Black Friday traffic. 

By contrast, Haus of Brilliance does around 50% of business between November and December. Kothari said his team is currently working through which discounts to offer for Black Friday, on which products, and on which marketplaces. 

“Everyone has different Black Friday, Cyber Monday-like deal setups.” For example, he said only Haus of Brilliance’s top 20 items can get selected for Amazon’s Lightning Deals, “and the rest of the catalog in the Black Friday-Cyber Monday promotional period doesn’t get as much exposure compared to something that has a Lightning Deal.”

Meanwhile, a retailer like Nordstrom “might reach out to us and say, you know, whatever items that you do at this much minimum discount, if you can opt in, you’ll get that Black Friday-Cyber Monday coverage,” he said. 

Different marketplaces also prioritize different products. For example, “Target doesn’t want anything over $500. So that [channel] just becomes a focal point on our lower price-point items,” he said. 

Ultimately, Kothari believes success on different marketplaces comes down to being a good partner.

“I want customers to see the whole breadth of our assortment, and I want our partners to be able to showcase everything that we can possibly sell during the holiday period, because Christmas only comes once,” Kothari said. 

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