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Reading this, I do wonder how long any middlemen will last in the age of the internet. Manufacturers don’t sell direct for a variety of reasons that steadily b
by lumost 6y ago
Reading this, I do wonder how long any middlemen will last in the age of the internet.
Manufacturers don’t sell direct for a variety of reasons that steadily become less compelling as the costs and complexity of shipping, advertising, and retail management fall.
How long before non tech firms follow the path of tech firms and sell direct?
- trentnix 6y agoIn the bike business (and many others), there are middlemen in between the middlemen! Between me and a bike brand would often be a distributor and in between me and the distributor was a sales rep! I found my sales reps (who took 1-4 points off the margin) to be generally likeable and altogether useless. But there they were, a relic of bike retail of old, still hanging on. And that's the view of more than a few consumers in terms of how they view their bike shop. Anything that can be sold direct, will be.
- opportune 6y agoI think the variety of SAAS platforms (spotify, stripe, shippo, no doubt countless others) becoming available that make it easy for a manufacturer to essentially buy all the business logic they need to sell D2C is the nail in the coffin.