The 2026 selling season is about to look very different. We’re at peak adoption of consumers using LLMs, like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity, to shop. Because of this, the consumer journey and path to conversion are now more complex. The trust consumers place in LLM responses to their shopping prompts is surprisingly high, with most shoppers relying entirely on the AI to shape the decision all the way to purchase. 

95% of shoppers who get a product recommendation from an LLM won’t visit a brand or retailer website to verify it. Among 18–27 year olds, 64% buy on the recommendation alone.

Twelve months ago, most brands were still focused on ranking in traditional search results. Consumer shopping behavior has changed more in the last 12 months than in the previous five years combined. That shift is going to define how every peak event plays out in 2026. 

Amazon and Walmart are blocking LLMs from crawling their product data. So, keeping consumers within the Amazon ecosystem to maximize Prime Day returns and overall conversions is critical. 52% of all U.S. consumers still begin their online product searches directly on Amazon,^¹ which is reassuring for Prime Day activity. But when we factor in the LLM component, our strategy to maximize Prime returns gets more nuanced. 

Previously, we wouldn’t have as heavily considered our clients’ .com websites as part of the Prime Day journey, but if LLM recommendations are relying on Google and other general product data feeds, then ensuring product data hygiene from those outside sources is critical. 

How should brands reach shoppers on Amazon and LLMs at the same time?

• For consumers already starting their journey in Amazon search, keep them engaged, targeted with appropriate content and ads, and slam dunk the conversion. 
• For consumers starting their search in LLMs, make sure client .com product data feeds are accurate, updated, and organized so the right recommendations entice consumers to seek out the shopping moment outside the LLM. 

There’s more to this year’s approach. Prime Day lands June 23–26 this year, the earliest window since 2021 and the second year at four full days.¹

Back-to-school demand is already overlapping with it. BFCM is less than six months out. And the LLMs shoppers are using to find and compare products have improved significantly since last peak season.

LLMs are pulling richer product details, making more accurate comparisons, and starting to support transactions directly. The brands and retailers who will perform best during peak 2026 are the ones whose catalogs are accurate, structured, and available everywhere the AI is looking. 

At Rithum, we work across 900+ channels with brands and retailers preparing for these events right now. We’re deep in the planning alongside them, from media strategy to product data to channel prioritization, and everything below reflects what we’re seeing and recommending heading into peak selling in 2026. 

What are the major 2026 peak sales events, and when do they happen? 

• Amazon Prime Day: June 23–26¹ 
• Back-to-school: May through September (peaks during and after Prime Day) 
• Labor Day: September 1 
• Amazon Prime Big Deal Days: October (dates TBD; October 7–8 in 2025) 
• Singles’ Day: November 11 
• Black Friday: November 27 
• Cyber Monday: November 30 

Beyond the timeline, two things connect every event on this list: AI is reshaping how shoppers discover products, and the brands with accurate, structured data across channels will capture more demand than those without it. 

How should brands prepare for Amazon Prime Day in June 2026? 

Prime Day runs June 23–26 across 35 categories, with deals dropping three times daily and new inventory going live every five minutes during peak hours.¹ Amazon is putting particular emphasis on fresh groceries and household essentials, building on 4 billion grocery and essentials items delivered via same-day delivery over the past year.² 

Last year’s Prime Day (July 8–11) generated $24.1 billion in U.S. online spend, up 30.3% year over year.³ Four of the top five items sold were household or grocery products.⁴ School supplies rose 175% and dorm essentials 84%.³

Across our own client base, the four-day format shifted buying patterns. Shoppers browsed Days 1 and 2, then converted late, with Day 4 GMV jumping 38% year over year. 

One Rithum client pivoted mid-event to back-to-school bundles and optimized product titles on Day 2. That shift drove a 15% sales lift over the prior year. The teams that adjusted in real time outperformed the ones that set a plan and left it. And that was before AI was deeply embedded in the Prime Day experience. 

What role does Alexa AI play in Prime Day 2026? 

This year, Alexa for Shopping (formerly Rufus) will sit directly in the Amazon search bar, search results, and product detail pages for every U.S. customer.¹ Amazon has told sellers that Alexa pulls from listing content to answer shopper questions and make recommendations. If your product attributes are incomplete, Alexa will recommend someone else’s.

During Prime Day 2025, shoppers who engaged Rufus were 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Alexa now helps shoppers build personalized deal guides, set price alerts, trigger auto-buy at target prices, and review 365-day price history. Every one of those features pulls from your product data. If your titles, descriptions, and images aren’t accurate, you’re not showing up in those conversations. 

Rithum’s retail media advertising connects spend to product performance across Amazon, Walmart, and Target so you can shift budgets while the event is live. Marketplace listings keep data accurate across 900+ channels so you can coordinate pricing, inventory, and promotions across Amazon and every channel competing for the same shopper during Prime Day. And inventory management prevents oversells and stockouts during the exact hours demand spikes. 

How does AI shopping change peak season strategy in 2026? 

When AI gets product information wrong, 58% of shoppers lose trust in the brand itself, not the AI tool that served it. And shoppers aren’t loyal to a single AI platform either: ChatGPT’s daily active user share has fallen steadily since early 2025, Gemini has more than doubled its share in the same period, and 20% of AI users now regularly use two or more chatbot apps. Brands that only optimize for one platform are leaving reach on the table. 

The shopping capabilities on these platforms have also matured. Perplexity offers one-click checkout through Buy with Pro and PayPal integration across thousands of merchants. Gemini supports agentic checkout through Google Pay, including auto-buy when a price target is met.

ChatGPT launched native shopping features in late 2025. These are live commerce channels, and every one of them relies on structured product data to generate accurate recommendations. 

We built ChatGPT and Perplexity Feeds for this: product data compiled, optimized for LLMs, and delivered for ingestion so your brand controls how it appears in AI recommendations. Our upcoming GEO (generative engine optimization) pilot provides a way to track how products appear, move, and compare within AI-driven results. Rithum and Stripe are also building the commerce infrastructure for transactions that happen inside the AI conversation itself. 

The path from catalog accuracy to LLM delivery to in-conversation purchase is what determines whether your products get recommended during peak season. Every step depends on the one before it, and most brands are still missing at least one. 

How early does back-to-school shopping start in 2026, and what should sellers prioritize? 

Back-to-school retail is projected at $85.42 billion in 2026, up 3.3% year over year.⁵ 67% of families started buying by early July 2025, up from 55% the year before. With Prime Day now in June and school supplies already among its top-performing categories (up 175% during Prime Day 2025³), back-to-school effectively starts during Prime Day. 

84% of parents say prices are too high. 82% are prioritizing value over brand. But 80% still say buying the specific products their child wants is important.⁵ Parents are cutting back on clothing and switching to store brands in some categories while spending full price in others. Brands that understand which of their products fall into which bucket can plan promotions accordingly. 

We recommend spreading promotions across May through September rather than concentrating spend in a single burst. Rithum’s product catalog feeds push near-real-time updates to price, stock, and product data across every channel where shoppers and AI agents are looking. For brands selling across multiple regions, automatic localization for language, currency, and regional specs keeps listings accurate without rebuilding feeds from scratch. 

What should brands plan for across Q4 2026 peak events? 

September through November packs five major sales events into 90 days, and performance in each one can help shape the strategy for the next. 

Labor Day (September 1) — The last major sales moment before Q4 takes over.

Brands use it to move seasonal stock in a smart way. They set pricing rules based on demand signals, not flat markdowns. This helps them carry less dead stock into the holiday rush.

Rithum automates promotional updates across marketplaces. Order management routes to the best fulfillment location based on your rules. 

Prime Big Deal Days (October) — Amazon’s separate October event, distinct from summer Prime Day.

The 2025 event (October 7–8) outperformed the prior year globally.³ Shoppers complete holiday purchases here, and the performance data directly informs Q4 decisions. Brands that connected product feeds to LLM platforms earlier in the year will have compounding advantages by October.

Singles’ Day (November 11) — $202 billion across major Chinese platforms in 2024, making it the largest single shopping event globally.³

The event continues to expand into Southeast Asia, where Chinese ecommerce players now account for up to 50% of B2C GMV in key markets. U.S. and European retailers saw an 11% year-over-year lift in influenced revenue last November. Rithum supports 600+ global marketplaces with built-in localization and dedicated account strategists across EU, US, and APAC. 

How should brands prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2026? 

Black Friday (November 27) and Cyber Monday (November 30) — BFCM 2024 delivered $10.8 billion (Black Friday) and a record $14.3 billion (Cyber Monday 2025).³

Promotions started climbing November 16 last year, nearly two weeks early. Mobile drove 56% of online holiday spend last season.³ AI-assisted shopping volume, which surged during Prime Day 2025, will be even higher by November as more consumers adopt LLM-based product discovery. 

During BFCM 2025, we advised clients to spread budgets from October through December. Clients increased spending by only 3% on average and still hit efficiency goals with a 1.7 advertising cost of sales. Here’s how those Prime Day lessons apply to holiday planning. 

Across all of these events, the operational requirements are the same: accurate product data everywhere you sell, budgets that can move in real time, and listings that don’t break under pressure. Rithum’s product catalog feeds deliver data to every channel and AI platform in the right format. Paid search and shopping ads optimize across Google, Microsoft, and Meta with feed-level precision. And marketplace listings catches broken or non-compliant listings before they cost you revenue during the highest-traffic weeks of the year. 

How do you prepare for peak season across 900+ channels at once? 

Our 2026 Commerce Readiness Index found that 43% of retailers and 37% of brands are prioritizing AI enablement across operations. The best teams have one thing in common at their busiest times. Product data, ad spend, inventory, and fulfillment all run in a single connected system. When something changes mid-event, they can act right away. 

Rithum brings all of that into one platform across 900+ channels and AI platforms. If you’re planning for peak 2026 and want to talk through your approach, our team is here. 

Footnotes
¹ Amazon Press Release, “Mark Your Calendars: Amazon Announces Prime Day Event from June 23–26,” June 2026. press.aboutamazon.com
² Forbes, “Amazon Prime Day 2026 Moves to June—This Time With Alexa AI Powering the Cart,” June 2026. forbes.com
³ Adobe Analytics, various reports including “Prime Day Event Drove $24 Billion in Online Spend Across U.S. Retailers” (July 2025), Black Friday 2024, Cyber Monday 2025, holiday season 2025, and Singles’ Day data. business.adobe.com
⁴ Numerator, “Amazon Prime Day 2025 First Half Results,” July 2025
⁵ MRI-Simmons, “Back-to-School Shopping Trends of the 2026 Season,” May 2026. mrisimmons.com | Accio, “Back-to-School Trends 2026.” accio.com

The post How to prepare for peak season 2026: Prime Day to BFCM appeared first on Rithum.

At a glance: 

• Shoppers who get a clear explanation of why an AI recommended a product are nearly 2x more likely to buy without verifying anywhere else. 
• Only 32% of shoppers named accuracy as the top trust-builder in AI recommendations. 49% chose a clear explanation of why a product was selected. 
• 47% of 28-to-43-year-olds say AI makes them faster decision-makers. Shoppers “very familiar” with AI tools are 3x more likely to purchase without verification. 
• When product data is wrong or incomplete, 80% of shoppers stay in the AI channel and ask again. 

A shopper asks ChatGPT for noise-canceling headphones for an open office, under $300. One result explains why it fits: isolates low-frequency hum, weighs less than comparable models, includes a transparency mode for conversations. Another lists a name, a rating, and a price. 

In a Rithum and Retail Dive survey of 1,046 U.S. and U.K. online shoppers, 49% named a clear explanation of why a product was chosen as the top trust-builder in an AI recommendation. Always-accurate information came in at 32%. And shoppers who get that explanation are nearly twice as likely to buy without checking anywhere else. 

Why shoppers value AI explanation over accuracy in product recommendations 

Shoppers expect AI to get the basics right. 67% named price as the top detail AI needs to be accurate on, followed by reviews and availability. But when asked what would most increase their trust, they reached past accuracy. 49% chose a clear explanation of why a product was selected. Always-accurate information came in at 32%. 

Any ecommerce team has seen this on a product detail page. Accurate price and clean specs keep a listing live. Rich attributes are what make it sell. The same applies to AI. An LLM builds its explanation from whatever product data it can find. If your listing includes driver size, noise cancellation type, and a note about comfort for all-day wear, the AI has something specific to say. If it doesn’t, the AI defaults to price. 

A jacket listed with fabric composition, weight, care instructions, and a note that it runs slim through the shoulders gives AI something to work with. A jacket listed as “men’s jacket, blue, available in S-XL” gives AI a price to compare. 

Newer brands with complete, attribute-rich product data already use this to their advantage, earning more persuasive recommendations than established names running on thin listings. When product data is wrong or incomplete, 80% of shoppers stay in the AI channel and ask again. The next answer is built on whatever data is available at that point. 

AI-powered shoppers buy faster and verify less 

47% of 28-to-43-year-olds say AI makes them faster decision-makers, compared to 21% of shoppers 60 and older. Shoppers who are “very familiar” with AI tools are 3x more likely to purchase without verification.   

For these shoppers, the explanation in the recommendation has to do the work that a product page, a review site, or a friend’s opinion used to handle. When the explanation falls short, the shopper moves to the next option in the response. There is no second visit, no follow-up search. The sale goes to whichever product explained itself best.   

How to optimize product content for AI recommendations 

Product content built for explanation earns stronger AI recommendations than content built only for visibility.   

• Enrich product attributes beyond the minimum required fields. Include use cases, compatibility notes, and sizing context. 

• Keep pricing and availability current across every channel where AI pulls data. 

• Monitor where shoppers verify AI recommendations and ensure your data holds up in those places too. Shoppers turn to search engines first at 28%, followed by online reviews at 19% and friends and family at 17%. 

• Test your own visibility: ask an LLM about your product category and evaluate whether your products appear with a clear, specific reason attached. 

• Prioritize data hygiene: validate and standardize titles, attributes, categories, and inventory/pricing sync so AI doesn’t amplify broken inputs across channels. 

Prioritize data hygiene: validate and standardize titles, attributes, categories, and inventory/pricing sync. AI can’t fix bad data. It can only move faster with whatever you give it, and when the inputs are off, that speed works against you. 

For a full breakdown of the data, download The New Discovery Engine report. 

The post Shoppers trust AI recommendations more when they explain why appeared first on Rithum.

Walmart Marketplace makes shopping simple, fast, and dependable for shoppers. Rithum extends that ease to sellers. We help sellers grow their Walmart Marketplace business and optimize their operations by simplifying the process of listing products, setting prices, and managing fulfillment.  

Rithum has helped thousands of brands list their products and find success on Walmart Marketplace since 2012. 40% of our sellers are active on Walmart.com and, on average, see a higher average order volume with Walmart than on other channels:     

• 40% of Rithum clients are active on Walmart, making it our top-performing US marketplace for growth and GMV.  
• 13% higher average order volume (AOV) than network average (Network $52.52 vs Walmart AOV $59.82)  
• 3-5% higher Net Merchandise Value (NMV) with Walmart versus other key marketplaces across the Rithum network (old stat need to get updated report) 

*Source: Rithum data

Fast onboarding and setup on Walmart Marketplace 

Thanks to a strong relationship with Walmart Marketplace, Rithum sellers enjoy a premium white-glove onboarding experience. Once approved, many of our sellers can begin listing their items in as little as 24 hours, with most fully set up within five days. 

Make the most out of Walmart’s tools with Rithum 

Rithum sellers enjoy early access to Walmart Marketplace’s newest tools and programs—designed to help sellers grow with confidence. Rithum helps you get more out of the tools and programs available on Walmart Marketplace. Rithum can help you:

• Expand your product assortment 
• Increase conversion rates and drive more sales  
• Generate more positive customer reviews  
• Reach more shoppers  
• Fulfill orders faster while reducing shipping costs 

Here are Walmart Marketplace’s leading tools and how we help you get the most out of them to grow your business. 

Expand your catalog with the Assortment Growth dashboard 

Want to know what customers are already searching for on Walmart.com? The Assortment Growth dashboard shows top-selling items in a seller’s category and makes it easy to add them directly to their catalog.  

Here’s how it helps: 

• Shows what shoppers are searching for so sellers can add the right products. 
• Helps sellers make smarter choices by offering simple insights on trends and performance. 
• Enables sellers to add items quickly using an easy setup tool that saves time. 

Rithum also helps detect and fix listing errors when sellers upload new items and also optimize product listings for success.

Automate your pricing strategy with Repricer 

Keep your offers competitive with Repricer. This tool automatically adjusts prices based on seller-defined strategies, which helps sellers maximize sales while saving time on manual updates. Rithum’s integration with the Repricer API means sellers can quickly get started with Walmart’s pricing tools.

Fulfillment options for Walmart sellers through the partnership  

Running a successful marketplace business requires smooth operations, controlled costs, and fast-moving orders. Rithum helps sellers streamline fulfillment on Walmart Marketplace by making it easier to use Walmart’s built-in tools and programs. From one platform, sellers can manage orders, keep inventory in sync, and automate key fulfillment steps, so products get to customers faster and with fewer manual tasks. 

Here’s how sellers can streamline fulfillment on Walmart Marketplace:  

• Discounted shipping: Save on every order with Walmart’s Preferred Carrier Program.  
• Ship with Walmart: Now available in Rithum, giving sellers access to discounted shipping labels from trusted carriers like UPS, FedEx, and USPS, with savings up to 60% below market rates. Eligible shipments include automatic protection up to $100 and support on-time delivery and valid tracking, with rate comparison available through the Ship with Walmart rate calculator.  
• Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS): Walmart handles storage, packing, and shipping so sellers can stay focused on growing sales. 
• Multichannel Fulfillment Solutions: Sellers can use their WFS inventory to fulfill orders from other sales channels. One inventory, multiple checkouts.  
• Automated tools: Keep inventory synced automatically—no manual updates needed. 

Get started selling on Walmart Marketplace through Rithum

Rithum can help you get set up and start selling on Walmart Marketplace simply and seamlessly. We’ll work with you and Walmart to help you reach more customers and grow your business.  

Reach out to our team to get started on Walmart Marketplace today. 

The post Start selling on Walmart Marketplace with Rithum appeared first on Rithum.

• Snapshot: eTail Insights surveyed marketplace and ecommerce leaders for Mastering the marketplace in retail and ecommerce to benchmark marketplace trends including what’s working, what’s breaking, and where budgets are going next. 
  Why it matters: These benchmarks show how marketplace teams describe their day-to-day reality right now. 

• Listing optimization no longer separates anyone. In the survey, every team rates its listing optimization capability as good or better, which tells you where the “easy wins” have already been harvested. 
  Why it matters: Listings may look “done,” but they stop being the lever that moves growth. 

• Retailer and brand teams lose time and margin on coordination. Inventory coordination across platforms ranks as the top challenge at 40%, followed by marketplace data integration at 33%. 
  Why it matters: When systems disagree, the fallout lands in fulfillment, customer service, and returns. 

• Leaders are budgeting for trust optimization above all else. Over the next 12 months, the top investment is customer service and review management systems at 51%, ahead of marketplace advertising and content expansion at 46%. This makes sense, as credibility optimization is key to meeting both customers’ and agentic shopping tools’ high standards. 
  Why it matters: Teams are funding the places where customers notice problems first and where reputations change fastest. 

• Profit pressure is shaping the stack. Competitive and dynamic pricing tools sit close behind at 41%, a signal that fees and price competition are forcing sharper math. 
  Why it matters: If teams can’t see the true cost per order, pricing tools can push them into underpricing. 

• Marketplaces are moving from “channel” to “center of gravity.” 81% expect marketplace sales to become more important to overall strategy, and 73% expect that shift within the next year. 
  Why it matters: Marketplace execution is becoming core operations, not an add-on project. 

A customer adds a refrigerator water filter to their cart. They’ve bought the brand before, and everything looks familiar. One click from paying, they pause. The model name is close, but not identical.  The customer taps the chat bubble in the corner of the screen to make sure they’re purchasing the right part.  

That bubble used to connect them to a live agent. Now it’s often an AI assistant, trained to answer product questions quickly, so the shopper doesn’t abandon checkout. 

“Is this the filter for model X?” 

The assistant replies instantly: “yes, it’s compatible.”  

But it’s not.  

The filter fits a similar model with a near-identical name. The product listing doesn’t clearly distinguish the two, so the AI fills in the gap with the most plausible-sounding answer. The customer buys anyway. The filter arrives, doesn’t fit, and gets returned. 

The return reason isn’t “wrong model.” It’s “defective.” The frustration isn’t just with the product. It’s with the guidance the shopper trusted. 

This is the kind of mistake customers try to avoid. When it happens anyway, they don’t blame the model, they blame the seller. Marketplaces penalize getting it “almost right” with returns, bad reviews, and support costs. The warning appears in performance long before you see it on a dashboard. 

The new marketplace problem: the storefront that moves faster than operations 

Most organizations aren’t dabbling in marketplaces anymore. Nearly everyone sells on Amazon. Most also sell on Walmart.com, according to eTail’s Mastering the marketplace in retail and ecommerce report. 

But while most respondents say their marketplaces strategy is at least somewhat effective for revenue, there is a deeper problem. Each marketplace comes with its own rules and requirements. Retailers and brands don’t describe their biggest marketplace challenges as “getting listed” (the industry has evolved past that point). They describe them as keeping platforms aligned. 

Inventory coordination across platforms ranks as the top challenge at 40%. Marketplace data integration follows at 33%. 

Those aren’t minor headaches. They sit underneath the moments customers remember: the delivery promise that never was, the unwelcomed out-of-stock surprise, the placement part that “should have worked,” or the one-star review that deters others from buying your product. 

Meanwhile, marketplace importance keeps rising. 81% say marketplaces will become more important to overall strategy, and 73% expect that shift to happen within twelve months. So, as opportunity grows, the friction grows along with it. 

Where marketplace execution starts to separate teams

Listing optimization is not the weak point: every respondent rates their listings as good or better. But when everyone feels strong in the same area, it is no longer a competitive advantage. Instead, the advantage shifts to what’s more difficult to keep consistent at scale, such as inventory accuracy, data consistency, review health, margin control, and service quality. 

It also moves to the places where organizations admit weakness. In this case, one-third rate “review and reputation management” as fair or poor. 

That gap matters because reviews aren’t just social proof. They shape ranking, conversion, and what shoppers learn before they buy. They also feed the summaries shoppers increasingly rely on, whether that’s a marketplace recap, a review highlight, or an AI-style shopping assistant answer. A shopper who doubts your listing doesn’t read your FAQ. They read your reviews. 

Marketplaces reward speed, but trust decides who keeps the sale 

Marketplaces raise expectations without lowering complexity. Shoppers expect quick answers, fast shipping, and painless resolution even when the catalog and fulfillment reality are messy.  

Trust decides whether a retailer or brand keeps the sale. On marketplaces, customers judge trust through what happens when something goes wrong and what other buyers say happened to them. That’s why the report’s investment priorities matter. Leaders are investing in customer service and review management systems at 51% over the next year, ahead of advertising and content expansion at 46%. 

Competitive and dynamic pricing tools follow close behind at 41%, underscoring how quickly the fees and shifting costs can erode margins. Teams don’t lead with service systems unless service continues to break. 

The catalog is the experience now 

The story of a mismatched water filter isn’t really about AI. It’s about what happens when product information fails under pressure and gets repeated across channels. 

Marketplaces have always punished unclear product information, but the old failure mode looked different. A customer read the listing, guessed, and learned the truth when the package arrived. 

Now the failure happens earlier. Customers ask questions mid-journey and even when the catalog is incomplete or inconsistent, the assistant still answers. When two SKUs look nearly identical, the assistant still picks one. When variation structure is messy, the assistant still tries to resolve it. If your product data leaves room for interpretation, the assistant will fill it, and you will own the consequences. 

What breaks first when teams scale marketplaces 

Most marketplace failures don’t start with a dramatic crash. Then one day, someone notices reviews shifting in tone. Support tickets spiking. Returns rising. A marketplace rep flags an issue. A finance team sees margin slip and can’t tie it to one decision. 

Coordination can be the biggest bottleneck. Inventory coordination and marketplace data integration top the list. If you can’t keep systems aligned, you can’t keep promises aligned. 

Three shifts that make marketplace growth easier to scale 

Most teams don’t need a radical reinvention. They need to tighten the parts that create expensive downstream effects. 

These three easy shifts  map directly to what leaders say is slowing them down. 

1) Treat inventory coordination like a revenue problem 

Inventory coordination across platforms ranks as the top marketplace challenge. This sits at the center of marketplace performance. 

When inventory is wrong, you don’t just lose a sale. You lose ranking and trust. You waste customer support time. You pay for returns. You create reviews that never should have existed. 

Start by making your inventory view boring and reliable. Establish one source of truth for what’s sellable. Push that truth to every platform on a cadence you can defend. 

That shift prevents the “invisible losses” teams learn to tolerate, including cancellations, refunds, angry reviews, and time spent explaining mistakes. 

2) Treat review management as a system, not a reaction 

One-third of survey respondents rate “review and reputation management” as fair or poor. That’s one-third of teams saying they still treat reviews reactively—and know that it’s hurting them. 

Reviews deserve a better approach because they aren’t random. They’re patterns. 

A shopper complains that the filter “didn’t work.” Another says the product “felt defective.” A third says the listing “misled them.” The issue is expectation. 

Route review themes back to the source. If customers keep confusing models, fix the variation structure. If customers misunderstand compatibility, tighten attributes. If customers misread product claims, update bullet copy. 

When review management becomes a loop instead of a fire drill, you stop treating bad reviews as a cost of doing business. 

3) Align marketplace data before you scale ads 

Marketplace data integration ranks as the second-biggest challenge at 33%, and it’s easy to underestimate how costly those integration speed bumps become once you push harder on growth levers. 

Incomplete integration creates quiet inconsistencies: price mismatches, delayed updates, missing attributes, inventory errors that propagate across systems. 

Then advertising scales and performance doesn’t follow. You spend more to acquire customers you can’t keep, and you blame the campaign when the problem lived upstream. 

Tighten the data path before you scale spend. Your future self will thank you in fewer support tickets and cleaner margin. 

Where AI fits without hijacking your strategy 

AI can help marketplace teams move faster. It can spot inconsistencies, flag missing fields, draft content variants, and speed up service workflows. 

It cannot rescue messy foundations. Give it incomplete data and it produces confident answers built on gaps. That’s why product truth has become a performance lever: AI increases the speed of both accuracy and error. 

What mastering the marketplace looks like in 2026 

Most teams feel good about listings. The report shows the friction elsewhere: inventory coordination, marketplace data integration, and review management. That’s why next year’s spend tilts toward customer service and review systems ahead of content and advertising. 

Marketplace growth requires consistency. Keep one version of the product true across platforms: what it is, whether it’s available, what it costs after fees, and what the customer should expect. The report shows why this is hard at scale. Inventory coordination ranks as the top challenge at 40%, followed by marketplace data integration at 33%. When those basics slip, the cost surfaces as returns, heavier support volume, and reviews that live on the listing. 

Micah McGuire is Senior Product Marketer, Brands, at Rithum. 

The post Mastering the marketplace: Build credibility with accurate inventory, data, and reviews appeared first on Rithum.

This time of year, marketplace leaders are all asking the same question: how do we scale? The answers usually revolve around supply, selection, and seller acquisition. Neel Grover, CEO of ShopSimon, asks something else. He starts with deciding what must stay protected as the marketplace grows, then builds backward.  “This is my fifth marketplace that I’ve done over the last two decades,” Neel said at the Rithum LIVE event in New York. “I’ve been in the marketplace business literally for 20 years now and wanted to do some things differently.” 

ShopSimon reflects those choices. ShopSimon is Simon Property Group’s digital marketplace for premium and luxury sale-priced products, with “guaranteed authenticity” and savings of up to 85% across fashion, handbags, shoes, beauty, and home. It lists more than 1 million products across thousands of brands, including Nike, adidas, Hugo Boss, and Puma. The business stays curated by design. It avoids buy box mechanics that pull marketplaces toward commoditization. It shares customer data with brands under specific conditions. And it treats Simon’s physical footprint as a fulfillment and discovery network with real operational demands, not a backdrop for brand storytelling. 

“We don’t really drive to a buy box,” Neel said. “We’re much more of a brand marketplace, and so we want brands to control the experience.” 

Neel has run marketplaces with thousands of sellers. “Whereas when I ran Buy and Rakuten, we had over 7,000 brands on our marketplace. Here we have about 450 today,” Neel said. That smaller footprint is intentional. ShopSimon stays selective by design, prioritizing a brand-controlled experience rather than buy box dynamics. 

Seller count looks like strategy until it changes behavior 

Seller count shows up in nearly every marketplace board deck because it’s easy to chart and hard to argue with. It changes how sellers compete and how the marketplace enforces standards. Price competition intensifies. Merchandising gets noisy. The customer experience begins to reflect the marketplace’s internal incentives rather than the brand’s intent. 

Neel has seen what happens when selection grows without guardrails, so he intentionally keeps ShopSimon selection tight. “We’re very curated,” Neel said. “We’re very selective on who can come on.” 

Curation protects the marketplace from the dynamics that turn premium brands into interchangeable inventory. It tells brands the marketplace won’t treat them like interchangeable listings, even as it grows.  

That tradeoff surfaced repeatedly during our conversation at Rithum LIVE. Scale is easy to measure, but brand trust depends on choices that limit it. 

For retailers building a marketplace, Neel’s approach forces an early decision. A marketplace can maximize selection, or it can protect an environment that brands trust enough to invest in. But it rarely does both well at the same time. 

That decision becomes real when retailers decide what the marketplace will enforce to protect brands, including: 

• Protect pricing behavior and merchandising consistency, even when sellers push for exceptions. 
• Give brands clear ownership of their experience on the site. 
• Make explicit what the marketplace will prioritize, especially as it grows. 

Neel acknowledged the tension that still exists in a curated model. Multi-brand sellers and distributors can surface lower prices and create brand friction. ShopSimon responds with posture and enforcement, not performative rhetoric. “We really want to be as true as we can to the brands,” Neel said. 

Brand trust starts with policy, not positioning 

Brands have heard every partnership pitch. They pay attention when a marketplace describes a rule set, especially around customer data. 

Neel framed ShopSimon’s approach as conditional collaboration, not open-ended generosity. “If a brand is exclusive with us in certain areas, we’ll actually share our customer data,” Neel said. “So, you can remarket back that customer back to your own website. To us that is true collaboration.” 

What stood out to me was how explicit the exchange is. Data sharing isn’t implied. It’s tied directly to exclusivity and collaboration, with a clear, practical benefit for brands. 

When brands evaluate marketplaces, Neel recommends a filter that starts with adjacency, not distribution volume. “Is this marketplace I’m looking at going to put my brand in a good light? Is it adjacent to how I want to be?” 

For brands, the best decision criteria rarely fit into a single dashboard metric. They come down to fit, context, and customer overlap. 

According to Neel, brands can best evaluate marketplaces by asking: 

• Does this environment strengthen how we want customers to see us? 
• Do we respect the brands we’ll sit next to? 
• Does the customer base align with where we want to grow? 
• Does the marketplace offer a real differentiator beyond another listing surface? 

BOPIS exposes whether a marketplace can operate in the real world 

Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) is where marketplace strategy collides with store reality. Neel built ShopSimon with a clear intent to connect online demand to Simon’s physical footprint. “We all agreed we could do things very differently,” Neel said, pointing to the ability to “tie into the 2 billion in store visits that happen in the malls and in the stores.” 

That ambition turned into a concrete initiative: buy online, pick up in store at a brand’s own location, launched by a marketplace. “We’re the first marketplace to launch buy online, pick up in store at your brand store,” Neel said. 

He also described why the hardest part doesn’t live in the integration layer. The hardest part lives in the store. “Operationally there are challenges,” Neel said. “The brand now has to train their employees to be able to not only handle their own BOPIS, but BOPIS through orders that come through us, which is not inconsequential.” 

ShopSimon’s framing of stores cuts through the usual omnichannel abstraction. “To me, those are little micro hubs and micro fulfillment centers,” Neel said. 

This store integration functions as a competitive moat. Software-only marketplaces can onboard sellers quickly and expand selection without taking on operational complexity. A marketplace that wants to route demand into stores must earn that capability through store workflows, training, inventory visibility, and service expectations. When the system works, it unlocks speed, proximity, and convenience that customers value. When it fails, it fails in public, at the counter, in front of customers. 

What stands out in Neel’s approach is that discipline often creates complexity rather than removing it. Curation requires enforcement. Data sharing requires clear rules. Store-based fulfillment requires systems that can reconcile marketplace orders with store operations in real time. These aren’t conceptual challenges. They’re execution problems, and they’re where marketplace strategies often stall. 

I’ve seen the same thing with retailers. The strategy isn’t the hard part. The hard part is building the operating model that can hold up once orders, inventory, and store teams are all in the mix. 

The ShopSimon team is working on lighter-touch capabilities that reduce friction for brands and store teams while expanding what customers can do with store inventory. “We are now looking at adding capabilities that will be even lighter touch on a brand side,” Neel said. 

Discovery works best when brands treat distribution as portfolio management 

Commerce leaders talk about discovery as a macro shift. Brands experience it as pressure to distribute widely. 

Neel takes a measured view. He believes brands benefit from broader product presence as discovery behavior evolves, but he also believes brands should resist the temptation to over-distribute and dilute control. “Getting a subset of your catalog out there so it can be discovered on other sites,” Neel said. “I’m not saying you have to have your whole catalog out there.” 

This distribution strategy treats marketplaces as differentiated surfaces with distinct audiences. Brands can choose whether to list the same subset everywhere or tailor assortment based on the customer base of each marketplace. “It may be really good for a subset of your products,” Neel said. 

He also pointed to why differentiation matters. “We’re deeply integrated into Simon,” he said, describing a “very large loyalty program” launching together. 

Marketplaces increasingly resemble each other on the surface. Brands will gravitate toward the ones that offer distinctive mechanics, clearer governance, and meaningful customer access. 

Cannibalization usually starts as a leadership decision 

Marketplace conversations often drift into cannibalization, as if the marketplace itself is the risk. Neel’s experience suggests a different diagnosis: organizations create cannibalization when they structure teams to compete. 

He has moved businesses from owned inventory to hybrid models and marketplace-first models. “We had to move from what I’d call an owned model to a marketplace model or a hybrid model,” he said. 

He described how internal competition showed up early. “There wasn’t a wholesale or owned inventory and a marketplace team, and it was competitive,” he said. 

He solved it by changing incentives. “I just ended up incentivizing the team on the overall sales of those products,” he said. 

That move aligns the organization around customer experience instead of channel politics. “At the end of the day you want to drive what’s going to be the best customer experience,” Neel said. 

Then he offered the line that should reset internal debates. “The customer doesn’t know if it’s wholesale or dropship or marketplace,” he said. “They don’t really care. They just want the product.” 

What serious marketplaces will prioritize next 

Neel didn’t frame ShopSimon as a marketplace that wins through volume. He framed it as a marketplace that wins through decisions other platforms avoid. It curates seller participation even when scale would be easier. It refuses to optimize around buy box mechanics even when price competition would drive short-term conversion. It treats customer data as a governed asset and offers brands a path to access it through clear collaboration. It invests in store-based fulfillment even though stores introduce training, labor, and process complexity. 

He also made clear why he took the role after spending two decades building marketplaces elsewhere. “I wasn’t looking to do another marketplace,” he said.  “We all agreed we could do things very differently.” For leaders who already understand marketplace mechanics, the takeaway is practical. Strategy begins with what you most need to protect, not what you can add. Smart constraints can help keep a marketplace consistent as it grows.  

Learn how Rithum supports marketplace operations teams.

Blaine Nielsen serves as President, Retail at Rithum. 

The post Building a new kind of marketplace: Lessons from ShopSimon CEO Neel Grover appeared first on Rithum.

U.S. ecommerce sales will jump 8% this holiday season, while overall retail is predicted to grow 4% during the peak seasonal shopping months. For retailers and brands, that surge raises the stakes: product data must be accurate, sites must perform under pressure, delivery promises must actually deliver, and returns must be seamless (or prevented, if possible). 

The Rithum 2026 commerce readiness index provides a timely view into these challenges. Based on an independent survey of retail and brand executives, it reflects what your peers are prioritizing right now as they prepare for 2026. The index was created to help retailers and brands identify the actions that matter most—and make measurable progress across channels and fulfillment so they’re stable and steady coming into 2026. 

What the survey responses reveal about 2026 for retailers and brands 

Pulling from the responses of commerce executives, the index focuses on what shapes results before and after purchase, the role of data quality in decision-making, how to get the most out of automation, and where the industry is bracing for impact. You’ll see benchmarks and practical plays from peers that will help you guide near-term priorities, including how they’re: 

• Fixing pre-checkout gaps by connecting ads to in-stock SKUs and keeping product pages current 

• Reducing avoidable contacts and returns after purchase 

• Cutting manual work with data standards and automation that speed decisions 

• Protecting margin with a clearer view of cost to serve 

• Implementing AI that delivers results, not just noise 

What breaks the path to purchase 

According to survey respondents, the path to purchase is breaking from a thousand small fractures that add up fast. Shoppers bounce at broken links, out-of-stock products, slow sites, confusing listings, and irrelevant ads. Post-purchase, they churn after poor service, clunky returns, and delayed communication.  

For retailers, the biggest cracks appear before checkout, with the majority pointing to ad-to-product page breakdowns, followed by payment issues. For brands, the pain shows up after the sale, with customer care and returns topping the list.  

Commerce leaders say what’s breaking isn’t just the customer experience, but the systems behind it. Siloed data, manual workflows, and slow response times leave teams reacting after the moment has passed. 

Coming into 2026, retailers and brands are focused on fixing the breaks that lose customers. The index shows where peers are investing in stronger product connections, clearer delivery promises, and smoother service to protect both satisfaction and margin. 

Why better data ends spreadsheet speed 

Many retailers and brands say they’re still stuck at “spreadsheet speed.” Manual work dominates, from vendor analysts pivoting late-order reports in Excel to reconciling conflicting data across systems. These steps slow reaction times and introduce errors that ripple through decisions. 

Nearly three in four executives admit they sometimes act on outdated or inaccurate data. More than one-third say it happens often. That kind of gap leaves strategy shaped by incomplete information rather than facts teams can trust. 

The index points to how retailers and brands are starting to move faster by cutting manual steps so decisions can happen in hours, not days, and so they can rely on standardized data at every level.

Why retailers and brands need this index 

Rithum’s 2026 commerce readiness index reflects what leading retailers and brands say is working before and after purchase, with benchmarks you can use to guide your next steps.  

Download the report to see the full findings. 

The post Use Rithum’s 2026 commerce readiness index to optimize channels and fulfillment today appeared first on Rithum.

Your biggest competitor isn’t necessarily the brand selling similar products on Amazon. It could be the fashion brand you’ve never heard of that’s quietly and methodically expanding into marketplaces that fit its selection, price point, and customer profile. Amazon, eBay, and Zalando have long been the cornerstone of many fashion brands’ marketplace strategies. They offer massive audiences, proven sales channels, and convenient logistics. But reach alone isn’t a strategy.

As margins shrink and costs grow, dependence on one or two platforms becomes a vulnerability. Amazon fees are 15% or less in most product categories, but sellers report that margins on alternative platforms, such as Shopify, are up to double what they are on Amazon. And relying on a single platform can lead to massive costs if an account is suspended or penalized, even temporarily. In one scary example, Couple’s Coffee had a five-day suspension lead to $15 – $17 thousand in lost sales. 

When major channels lose momentum 

It’s tempting to double down on Amazon: it’s what you know, it’s simple, and it’s profitable. In 2024, Amazon’s ecommerce sales were nearly triple the combined online sales of Walmart, Target, and Costco.  

But scale doesn’t guarantee stability. Algorithm shifts, fee increases, and rising traffic costs happen while selling on any marketplace. Concentrating too heavily on just one or two channels limits your ability to absorb disruption, test new strategies, or shift focus when performance fluctuates. Items that stall on Amazon, for example, might reach engaged shoppers on trend-driven TikTok Shop or Zalando’s fashion-first marketplace. 

The fashion industry also faces unique challenges that make marketplace diversification essential: 

1. Gen Z shopping behavior: Nearly 50% of Gen Z shoppers said they would shop through social media this year. Fashion brands need to meet younger consumers where they shop, and that’s increasingly on platforms like TikTok Shop and Instagram, not just traditional marketplaces. TikTok Shop is a top five sales channel for Rithum. 
2. Rising competition costs: As more than one million sellers join Amazon annually, advertising costs increase while organic visibility declines.  
3. Highly seasonal inventory demands broader reach: Fashion operates on quarterly cycles. When you’re limited to two to three platforms, you’re essentially limiting seasonal inventory to a fraction of available consumer touchpoints. Retailers like Shein are bringing new designs to market in as little as 15 days, shortening trend cycles even further. Every new collection represents an opportunity to test different marketplaces and demographics. 

Meanwhile, fashion-focused marketplaces are growing rapidly, offering curated experiences and loyal audiences. Zalando, Europe’s leading fashion marketplace, ended 2024 with 51.8 million active customers, up about 4.5% from 2023. Their success illustrates that fashion-first platforms are attracting engaged consumers with strong conversion potential. Fashion brands should pay attention.  

Barriers to expansion on new sales channels 

So you know you need to grow on new marketplaces, but you’re stuck on how. Expanding to just one new marketplace involves adapting product data, pricing logic, inventory syncing, and fulfillment operations, not to mention learning each channel’s unique policies and promotion mechanics. Scaling to several can feel like an operational nightmare. 

Based on conversations with customers, we see these common pain points come up again and again: 

• Marketplace complexity: Managing inventory, content, pricing, fulfillment, and promotions across multiple platforms quickly becomes overwhelming. Boardriders found that “scaling from 140 to 190 channels in a year would have been a logistical nightmare,” without Rithum. 

• The need for new growth: Established sellers often hit a ceiling: more ad spend doesn’t always yield more sales. Identifying new, high-potential channels, especially niche or regional marketplaces, can be elusive. Turkish brand Jimmy Key saw potential customers in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and other European countries. It reached them by expanding to four new marketplaces with Rithum and subsequently exceeded sales targets by 300%. 

• Scaling DTC brands: As brands grow beyond their own site, consistency becomes harder. Maintaining accurate content, inventory, pricing, and branding across diverse channels is a challenge without central control. ASICS faced this exact challenge, with a product catalog too large for a single person to manage.  

Rithum: solutions to roadblocks

With Rithum, you can manage content, inventory, orders, and performance across dozens of channels from one centralized system. That means faster time-to-market, cleaner catalog governance, and a significant reduction in the manpower required to scale. Jimmy Key experienced this transformation firsthand, and product listings that once took weeks to go live now take one to two business days 

Our AI Magic Mapper automatically aligns your products with marketplace-specific categories and requirements, eliminating the manual work that kills expansion momentum. 

Through our Commerce Network, brands can analyze channel performance data and identify the best marketplace opportunities for their specific catalog and customer demographics. Boardriders used this capability to expand channels by 35% while increasing sales value 15x from 2014 to 2024. 

For fashion brands looking to scale DTC operations, this centralized infrastructure is essential. As you grow beyond your own website, consistency across channels becomes harder to maintain (want an example of how it could go right? With Rithum’s help, ASICS centralized their approach and launched on Amazon, achieving 72% year-over-year revenue growth and 150% growth during their Cyber 5 period). 

Rithum helps preserve brand integrity while also enabling expansion into new revenue streams, regions, and audiences. 

Expansion isn’t optional for brands anymore 

Consumers are branching out from the old guard of established marketplaces to explore new spaces, like TikTok Shop, Instagram, Shein, and Temu. If your brand isn’t meeting them where they are, someone else will. Book & Mortar Record Store LLC proved this opportunity exists: After automating their TikTok Shop integration through Rithum, they went from adding 30 products per day manually to 1,000 products per day, with sales jumping 250% in their first month and 694% the following month. 

If any of these resonate, you’re likely overdue for marketplace expansion: 

• Stalled growth: Your Amazon/eBay sales are flat.  

• Margin pressure: Fees and advertising costs are rising.   

• Audience ceiling: You’re seeing diminishing returns from branded channels.   

• Algorithm shock: Recent ranking changes have dented impressions or conversions.   

• Competitive crowding: New brands are overtaking you in category rankings. 

If your team is spending more time fighting for incremental gains on Amazon than making bold moves elsewhere, it’s time to reassess your strategy. Broader marketplace expansion might feel intimidating, but with the right partner, it doesn’t have to be. 
 
Whether you’re navigating how to enter new channels, exploring long-tail opportunities, or simply trying to bring order to multi-marketplace chaos, Rithum is built to help fashion brands break through the noise and scale. 
 
Marketplace selling will only get more complex from here. But the brands who embrace that complexity, armed with the right tools, will find themselves with stronger margins, broader reach, and more control over their future. 
 
Explore how diversified marketplace selling can fuel your next wave of growth. Schedule a demo today 

Samantha Howard is Head of Merchandising at Rithum. 

The post The marketplace maze: why expanding beyond Amazon, eBay, and Zalando is essential for fashion brands  appeared first on Rithum.

This statistic should be in the back of every fashion executive’s mind: 50% of U.S. Gen Z consumers prefer to shop and explore new brands. That makes them the least loyal generational cohort; brands can win them more easily, but they can lose them, too. But that only scratches the surface of a much deeper behavioral shift that’s redefining fashion commerce. 

Gen Z doesn’t browse clothing the way previous generations did by looking at their chosen brands’ websites, comparing prices across tabs, or saving items to wish lists. Instead, they: 

• Discover through social feeds: 73% find new fashion brands through TikTok and Instagram content 
• Purchase within platforms: They buy directly without leaving their social environment
• Expect instant gratification: Fast fashion cycles have trained them to expect new styles weekly, not seasonally. For example, Shein introduces 2,000 to 10,000 new items daily.
• Value authenticity: Nearly one-third of global consumers look to influencers for beauty purchase inspiration. 

This fundamental shift in consumer behavior is just one part of a whirlwind of change and challenge facing today’s fashion brands. Beyond capturing Gen Z’s platform-native shopping behavior, they also face new obstacles in protecting intellectual property (IP) in an age of rapid trend replication and maintaining brand integrity. 

What happens when traditional ecommerce funnels not only don’t work, but make your brand essentially invisible to the fastest-growing consumer segment? 

Why traditional fashion marketing no longer works with Gen Z 

Gen Z has collapsed the fashion cycle from seasons to days. By the time a quarterly drop hits, the moment may have passed. The fashion brands that keep up are designing faster, acting on real demand, and choosing platforms that support quick turns while protecting what makes the brand their own. They’re developing more flexible operations and strategic platform diversification to remain competitive without compromising their core values. 

The IP risk that comes with Gen Z reach 

One of the best ways to meet consumers where they shop is through major marketplaces. These help brands grow and overcome some of those Gen Z-based challenges. But it comes at a cost. To list products, brands often share detailed specs, launch calendars, pricing, sales data, and customer behavior. 

Brands have options to connect with Gen Z while mitigating those concerns. TikTok Shop is a good option for brands concerned about IP protection as a platform where they can maintain control over their data and product releases. 

How to protect your brand’s identity while scaling 

Brands that scale successfully are selective. They choose platforms that support their positioning, respect their data, and meet evolving customer expectations to better keep up with Gen Z, especially.  

For example, when Nordstrom launched its digital marketplace in 2024, president of digital and customer experience Miguel Almeida specifically noted that it was “not going to become the everything store.” Instead, Nordstrom focused on more upmarket brands while growing slowly, he said. These kinds of premium marketplaces often also offer favorable data protection terms and performance data. 

Social commerce platforms like TikTok Shop reach Gen Z where they are already spending their time. With the right integration, teams can run campaigns and manage listings without exposing launch timelines or product data. 

And of course, your best option is to use Rithum to manage growth and expand reach, protect your data, and keep your brand integrity intact. 

Learn how we help here. 

Michael Marte is a Senior Sales Engineer at Rithum. 

The post How Fashion Brands Can Win Gen Z Without Giving Up Control appeared first on Rithum.

Annual ecommerce sales have surpassed $1 trillion, yet 60% of retailers and brands still struggle with profitability. This striking contradiction was at the heart of a recent webinar I moderated, featuring three industry experts who brought unique perspectives on scaling challenges. 

Rithum’s Senior Sales Director Nathan Bird joined Lauren Rowinski, General Manager of Multi-Channel Solutions at Walmart, and Matt Ligon, Senior Director of Channel Partnerships for Walmart Marketplace to discuss this profitability paradox.   

Here are the three biggest takeaways from their conversation that are still sticking with me: 

Takeaway #1: Growth Without Foundation Creates Operational Chaos 

Although it sounds counterintuitive, success can actually slow brands down. Nathan explained the common scenario many fast-growing brands face: 

“Growth usually means more channels, more SKUs, more people, and more data sources. And without a strong foundation, teams are left doing patchwork: updating product information, chasing inventory numbers, or merging reports manually to understand performance.” 

–  Nathan Bird, Senior Sales Director, Rithum

This fragmentation creates what our experts called the “Stack Overflow,” where teams are logging into five to six different systems daily just to manage their ecommerce operations. According to live polling during the webinar, 60% of attendees were experiencing exactly this challenge.  

And the hidden costs go far beyond manual labor. Lauren emphasized how disjointed systems impair decision-making speed: “Acting and operating with speed can set sellers and brands apart. Adoption of new APIs, products, and listing strategies really start to compound over time.” 

The solution isn’t necessarily fewer tools. It’s ensuring those tools communicate effectively. As Nathan noted: “What’s critical is that your systems are talking to each other and not past each other, and most importantly, speaking the same language.” 

Takeaway #2: Visibility Is Essential to Profitable Scaling 

Visibility, specifically, the ability to see profitability by SKU and by channel in real-time, emerged as a common thread between stories of scaling successfully in the webinar. 

Nathan shared a case study of Flat River Group, an ecommerce distributor in the toy category. “As their business grew, so did their operational complexity. While they had logistics and supply chain in place to support growth, they lacked the technical infrastructure to integrate with new marketplaces at speed.” 

Using unified platform automation, Flat River expanded to six new marketplaces, including Walmart, Target, eBay, Macy’s, Michaels, and Oriental Trading, in just eight months, all without hiring additional team members. 

The key differentiator wasn’t just automation itself, but the visibility it provided. “The majority of clients we speak to struggle to see profitability by SKU and by channel, and are often flying blind,” Nathan explained. “That’s usually where the operational cracks start and where the fastest improvements come from.” 

This visibility enables what Matt called “playing offense” rather than defense: “You really want to operate in a state where you’re playing offense,” he said, emphasizing how unified data enables brands to act with confidence rather than react to problems. 

Takeaway #3: Multi-Channel Infrastructure Is Becoming Table Stakes 

The third major insight focused on the evolving role of fulfillment and logistics in ecommerce success. Rather than viewing different marketplaces as separate challenges, according to Walmart and our own Rithum team, winning brands are treating them as components of a unified customer experience. 

Lauren highlighted how Walmart’s approach exemplifies this shift:

“Through our Multi-Channel solutions, sellers can leverage their Walmart Fulfillment Services inventory for orders from other marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Shein, Temu, and social media shops, like TikTok and Instagram.” 

– Lauren Rowinski, General Manager of Multi-Channel Solutions at Walmart

This strategy addresses one of the webinar’s key findings: fragmented fulfillment creates poor customer experiences and drives up costs. The solution is about meeting customers where they are in their purchasing journey. 

As Matt explained: “Rather than trying to change customer behavior, you can really insert yourself directly in their preferred purchasing path. Many consumers start with product searches directly on marketplaces, bypassing search engines or individual brand websites.” 

The numbers support this shift toward multi-channel infrastructure: Walmart alone sees approximately 270 million customers and members shop across their stores and e-commerce channels each week.  

The brands we see succeeding in 2025 are building systems to reach customers across all marketplace touchpoints. Want to dive deeper into how they do it? Watch the full webinar recording to hear more from these experts. 

(Some quotes have been lightly edited for context and clarity.) 

Jennifer Connally is Product Manager at Rithum.

The post The Profitability Paradox: 3 Key Insights from Walmart and Rithum on Solving Ecommerce Growth Challenges in 2025 appeared first on Rithum.

The big summer sales surge is about to begin, with Amazon Prime Day kicking off July 8-11, Target Circle Week (July 6-12), and Walmart Deals (July 8-13). It’s the big show that sellers have spent months prepping for: and now, deals are locked, inventory is in place, and the curtain is about to rise. 

But for sellers in top-performing categories across Amazon, Walmart, and Target, the real work is just starting. 

High-performing categories can be high-risk for sellers 

We expect that apparel, electronics, and home goods will once again be the most competitive categories. If you’re managing those listings, errors in availability, pricing, or categorization could lead to missed sales in a high-traffic window. 

This isn’t just about what sold last year. It’s about what every other brand is focused on now, and how well your team is positioned to compete in categories where margins are tight, consumer attention is limited, and mistakes can be costly. The strength of your listings, product feeds, retail media campaigns, and fulfillment operations will determine whether you break through or are overlooked during this peak sales event. 

What we can learn from 2024 sales data 

Clothing/shoes/accessories was the top-selling category for Amazon during Prime Day July 2024, up 16% year over year, according to Rithum data. This category is one of the most operationally intense, with large SKU counts, high returns rates, and customer expectations around fit, speed, and accurate presentation. 

On the flip side, clothing/shoes/accessories category also top the list in overall return volume, according to Rithum’s 2025 Global Returns & Profit Impact Report. Common drivers include poor fit, vague sizing charts, or missing details in product images or descriptions. 

The mix of strong sales and high return rates puts margin at risk. Listing accuracy is more than a conversion play. It protects post-sale margin. 33% of shoppers return items when the product doesn’t match the description or photos. In high-paced sales cycles, it’s even more important for product titles, images, size guides, and fulfillment settings to be locked in before traffic spikes. Rithum’s AI Magic Mapper helps automate setup and reduce manual errors across large, complex catalogs—especially in apparel and consumer electronics. 

To avoid fulfillment at a loss, brands can also rely on Rithum’s Price Protection. This safeguard prevents costly pricing errors before listings go live, reducing the chance of cancellations, penalties, or margin hits during high-traffic windows. 

Last year, consumer electronics/photo was the second-highest performing category globally. Its popularity is tied to high purchase intent, where shoppers arrive at Prime Day already prepared to buy TVs, headphones, tablets, and smart devices they’ve researched in advance, according to Wiser. These buyers come with high expectations. Listings often require exact specs, compatibility info, and current images. Inaccurate details can result in returns or negative customer reviews (electronics also ranked among the top categories for return volume, according to Rithum’s return report. 

What to check before Prime Day begins 

If you’re in one of the high-volume categories—or expecting to be—make sure your setup is solid. Use this checklist to prepare: 

• Review listings for accuracy, detail, and compliance with marketplace standards 
• Use listing error detection to flag and resolve content or formatting issues 
• Check inventory levels across fulfillment partners and channels 
• Confirm routing, delivery windows, and stock buffers 
• Adjust retail media spend to align with margin and availability targets 

With Prime Day running four full days from July. 8-11, brands need staying power across the event. Budget pacing, creative adjustments, and close monitoring of seller notifications and listing status will help maintain visibility and performance from start to finish. 

Pricing and inventory decisions should be dynamic, especially with tariffs adding cost pressure and shoppers reacting quickly to price changes. Repricer automation can adjust pricing in response to competitor moves, inventory levels, and preset rules. These tools can also be reviewed after Prime Day to refine strategy ahead of back-to-school and holiday cycles. 

Inventory alerts help protect both revenue and spend. Low stock warnings prompt action before products sell through. Sellers can pause ads, shift budget, or trigger replenishment with minimal disruption. 

Once Prime Day starts, there’s little time to correct the course. Rithum’s Advisor can help you respond in real time and guide post-event optimizations using actual sales data. 

Why localization matters for global sellers 

In the U.S., the top Prime Day categories mirrored global trends: apparel, electronics, home goods, and automotive. In the U.K., toys and outdoor gear climbed. Germany saw growth in beauty and wellness. 

These differences matter. Even when SKUs are consistent, listing requirements often aren’t. Shipping dimensions, voltage compatibility, ingredient disclosures, and delivery expectations vary by region and channel. So do packaging rules and marketplace standards. 

Rithum gives brands the tools to localize at scale. Product content, fulfillment logic, and taxonomy mapping can be adjusted for each market without duplicating work or managing disconnected systems. That reduces error and accelerates speed to market. 

How to get more from your retail media spend 

With this year’s Prime Day event extending longer than the typical 2-day time frame (and Walmart extending their sale event across 6 days), brands will need to be flexible with their approach and budget. Beyond scaling when demand spikes and pulling back when stock runs low, it is important to do a larger audit of the competitive landscape to understand which sellers are offering the most compelling discounts and how those offers are appearing across marketplaces. 

“Speculation this year of less 3P sellers active due to tariff impact provides an opportunity for other 1P and 3P brands and sellers to carve out more market share due to less competition,” says Meghan Barden, Director of Global Retail Media at Rithum. “Understanding the entire competitive landscape and overall activity each day of the Prime event is now more important than ever, and we are advising our clients to have an agile approach to the sale from a budget and overall advertising perspective.” 

Rithum connects retail media ad strategy to live product data from our marketplaces feed in our proprietary platform, allowing teams to respond to what is happening in their catalog rather than relying on fixed plans. 

Here’s how to stay in control: 

• Shift spend based on organic lift: Move budget away from products that are already gaining traction 
• Pause ads for low inventory: Avoid paying for clicks on items that are nearly out of stock 
• Align with margins: Factor in fees, storage, and shipping costs to support profitable outcomes 
• Adapt mid-campaign: Adjust bids and targeting based on current performance 

Retail media should support strong product performance and work symbiotically with organic product optimization efforts for a successful presence in Prime Day.  

Walmart and Target reflect, but don’t replicate, Prime Day 

Walmart and Target both saw strong summer sales in 2024. Their top-performing categories were similar to Amazon’s, but key differences stood out. While apparel, home goods, and electronics remained competitive, each retailer had different standouts. 

Target gained traction in general merchandise and industrial products. Walmart stood out in automotive and mass-merchant categories, helped by strong omnichannel promotions and in-store pickup options. 

Success on Walmart, Target, and other marketplaces, takes more than duplicating your Amazon playbook. Each has its own taxonomy, fulfillment expectations, and content rules. Rithum helps sellers navigate these requirements with platform-specific templates, listing validations, and customized routing strategies. 

For Walmart, Rithum’s integration upgrades give brands access to additional tools, including: 

• Multichannel fulfillment that supports store pickup and delivery 
• Walmart Review Accelerator to boost review volume and visibility 
• Lower-cost shipping through Walmart’s carrier network 

These upgrades enable teams to manage listing accuracy and delivery performance more effectively, especially during peak traffic events like Prime Day. When every platform plays by different rules, having the right structure in place keeps your products shoppable and compliant across the board. 

These upgrades help teams manage listing accuracy and delivery performance more effectively, especially during peak traffic events like Prime Day. When every platform plays by different rules, a flexible structure keeps products shoppable, compliant, and positioned to perform. 

Post-event, the work continues. Reviewing performance metrics and analyzing cancellation and return rates can uncover where expectations fell short or exceeded expectations. Segment-level insights from tools like Rithum Report Center help identify which products overdelivered and which need attention. For teams looking to scale these efforts across marketplaces, Rithum Managed Services supports listing, fulfillment, and campaign management with the consistency and coverage that high-volume events demand. Applying these learnings now sets the foundation for stronger execution in back-to-school, and peak holiday season. 

Learn how Rithum can help. 

Top 5 categories by region and retailer: Prime Day 2024 

Based on Rithum’s 2024 Prime Data, here are the top five categories sold by region and retailer: 

Amazon: Global 

1. Clothing / Shoes / Accessories 
2. Consumer Electronics / Photo 
3. Home / Kitchen 
4. Office Products 
5. Automotive / Motors / Marine 

United States 

1. Clothing / Shoes / Accessories 
2. Consumer Electronics / Photo 
3. Office Products 
4. Home / Kitchen 
5. Automotive / Motors / Marine 

United Kingdom 

1. Toys / Games / Hobbies / Crafts 
2. Clothing / Shoes / Accessories 
3. Home / Kitchen 
4. Consumer Electronics / Photo 
5. Sports / Outdoor Equipment 

Germany 

1. Consumer Electronics / Photo 
2. Home / Kitchen 
3. Clothing / Shoes / Accessories 
4. Beauty / Health / Personal Care 
5. Sports / Outdoor Equipment 

 Walmart 

1. Consumer Electronics / Photo 
2. General Merchandise / Mass Merchants 
3. Automotive / Motors / Marine 
4. Beauty / Health / Personal Care 
5. Clothing / Shoes / Accessories 

Target 

1. General Merchandise / Mass Merchants 
2. Clothing / Shoes / Accessories 
3. Consumer Electronics / Photo 
4. Home / Kitchen 
5. Industrial / Scientific 

 Cameron Sutton is Senior Manager, Strategic Account Managment at Rithum. 

The post 2025 Prime Day Primer: What to Fix Before the Sales Surge appeared first on Rithum.