#7 – Ten reasons D2C ecommerce is dead (For non-D2C brands)

Here are 7 reasons why old-school brands should drop the D2C. This list is based on my experience working with brands

1. Politics. When you start competing with your own retailers for the same customers, then you open up a world of politics that you did not know existed. Hard to explain, you need to try it before you understand this :-). Ultimately this will destroy your brand.
2. eCommerce is not in their DNA. They have no chance against large eCommerce companies or focused D2C brands.
3. It is hard to scale to new markets.
4. Your brand will be less attractive for local retailers to promote, and therefore your brand will drop.
5. Your consumers, don’t live for your brand. They want to mix brands when they shop and it gets inconvenient when they need to go to each brand’s store.
6. It is expensive to operate retail. Operating retail is different from building a brand. You need skilled staff, you need to manage your eCom team (Who gets good opportunities to leave your company each week), you now have transactions with consumers that you need to do accounting for and on top of that you are now also in the customer service business. All of this also is a low-margin business. All this will eat up the nice margin that you build your business case on, but again you will not understand the complexity of retailer before you have gone all in on it.
7. Marketing is expensive. Your retailers already have millions of customers on their email list and in their push notifications, your start out from 0, so you need to pay Google and Meta.

Any counter-arguments? Do you have any (Leave a comment)

**** But Nike is doing it….. True****

What is the alternative D2C business for classic brands:

• Work closely with your eCommerce retailers. Provide them with what they need, which is: exclusive deals, fair purchase prices, super fast delivery, financing and great content. Then you will be flying.
• Instead of building your own online store, make a great website displaying your product and showing where customers where your products are in stock product.