Magento’s announcement today that they are adding native Magento Commerce Amazon support, with Magento 2 support coming later this year, will doubtless be a cause for concern for incumbent multichannel management providers. The attractions of managing Amazon marketplace sales natively within Magento are obvious, but there is still space where 3rd party integrators can win.
Magento Commerce claim to fame is as the #1 provider to the InternetRetailer Top 1000, the B2B 300 and the Top 500 Guides for Europe and Latin America. These are the most lucrative customers for multichannel management platforms who operate on a sales commission basis. Naturally they’re also attractive prospects for multichannel management charging on a tiered basis, falling into the enterprise bracket.
There is some good news for multichannel management providers, currently native Magento Amazon support will be limited to Magento Commerce until later this year. This leaves some months to consolidate product offerings and build compelling propositions for client retention before support for Magento 2 rolls out.
Perhaps the best defence multichannel management solutions offer is support of multiple marketplaces and balancing inventory across them. An integration with Amazon, not matter how large Amazon grows, is still a single point marketplace integration and doesn’t cover eBay or any of the other marketplaces across the EU and rest of the world.
Of course the best defence against a new competitor is to be better to the extent that existing customers don’t see the advantage of changing operations and so compelling that retailers new to marketplaces choose your solution. It’s also possible that native Magento Commerce Amazon support will generate additional interest in Amazon prompting new retailers to examine all available multichannel solutions.
Magento have called their new functionality ‘sales channel capabilities’, so we can expect them to add additional channels in the future, but for the moment we’ll be watching to see if it is existing Amazon merchants who sign up to use the service, or if large retailers and brands not currently selling on Amazon are convinced it’s time to do so.
