Amazon Growth Is Slowing. Where Should Your Company Go Next?

An international consumer brand can spend years building its U.S. business on Amazon. Then growth slows. Fulfillment and advertising cost more. Each additional dollar of sales gets harder to earn.

The CEO starts looking for the next growth engine.

For many companies, the first instinct is traditional retail. They see peers entering Walmart, Target, Best Buy, or Costco and assume stores are the next step. The size and visibility are attractive. What is less clear is why the company would win there, what the retailer gains by adding it, and whether the business is ready to support the channel.

Retailer marketplaces create another path. Walmart Marketplace, Target Plus, Best Buy Marketplace, and other platforms can help an established Amazon brand reach new customers and build credibility before, or sometimes instead of, a broad in-store push.

What I have learned is that choosing the marketplace is only the beginning. Most of the work sits inside the business, where the company has to build the capabilities needed to turn that new channel into meaningful growth.

Start with the reason to win

I still find the four Ps useful because they force a basic question: what advantage does this company bring to the U.S. market that customers do not already have?

Too often, the answer is a quality product at a lower price. Price matters, but it rarely creates a durable advantage. It can also be unattractive to a traditional retail merchant. If a new vendor only takes sales from an existing brand at a lower price, the retailer's total category dollars may shrink while its complexity and risk increase.

Look at the opportunity through the retailer's eyes. A new brand should bring incremental demand, serve an unmet customer need, fill an assortment gap, or offer a product whose benefits fit the retailer's customer and price architecture.

That same test applies to a marketplace. Ask why the product would win on this platform with this customer. A premium, technology-led product may have a different fit than a value-oriented product. The largest retailer is not automatically the best first choice.

Expensive syndicated data can sharpen this analysis, but many emerging brands cannot justify it. A practical first view can come from the retailer's current assortment, price bands, promotions, customer reviews, prominent competitors, marketplace account managers, and a bounded product test. International companies often know the brands they aspire to compete with. Studying where those products fit can reveal where a credible opportunity exists.

Marketplaces can be a natural bridge beyond Amazon

Established Amazon teams already understand several capabilities that matter elsewhere: catalog execution, pricing, advertising efficiency, ROAS, reviews, rapid iteration, and relentless performance management. Many international companies can apply those strengths without immediately building a large U.S. organization.

The retailers have their own reasons to expand marketplaces. Third-party sellers can add assortment and generate marketplace and advertising revenue without requiring the retailer to own every unit of inventory. Walmart also offers fulfillment services, while Target Plus uses a more curated third-party model. Best Buy launched its current U.S. digital marketplace in August 2025. Each platform has a different customer promise, admission model, and operating maturity. See the official marketplace information from Walmart, Target, and Best Buy.

Marketplace participation is still different from a wholesale relationship or an in-store assortment. A logo on a website does not mean the brand has entered the retailer's stores. Leadership should keep 3P marketplace, first-party wholesale, and in-store businesses separate in its strategy and financial reporting.

Amazon success can hide operational weakness

Amazon makes a complex business feel simpler than it is. FBA can absorb much of the warehousing, fulfillment, shipping, and customer-service burden, allowing a company to grow while its own systems and 3PL processes remain fragmented. Other marketplaces have a way of exposing those gaps.

In recent marketplace work, I have learned to listen for words such as “manual,” “download,” and “upload.” They often point to missing APIs, middleware, ERP connections, inventory synchronization, order routing, shipment confirmation, returns handling, or financial reconciliation.

I do not design those systems. My job as a commercial leader is to recognize when the revenue plan depends on capabilities that nobody has verified, explain the commercial consequence, and bring the right operations, technology, finance, and logistics owners into the decision.

The work can take six to nine months before the channel operates efficiently. Revenue during the first 30 or 90 days may say more about incomplete infrastructure than customer demand. A CEO should separate operational readiness from commercial performance.

Protect the business that pays the bills

An Amazon-led company may have nearly its entire portfolio on one platform. Moving the same products into another marketplace introduces pricing, promotion, inventory, and ownership conflicts.

I have seen identical promotional pricing across platforms create consequences for Amazon visibility and the Buy Box. The exact platform response can vary, but the leadership issue is consistent: one marketplace team should not make a locally attractive decision that damages the company's total result.

A company-level view should show net sales, contribution after marketplace costs, advertising, inventory commitments, overlapping products, current and planned promotional prices, operational exceptions, and known effects on other channels.

The long-term answer may involve better lifecycle management or channel-specific products, bundles, value lines, or professional lines. That transition is rarely clean. Productive legacy SKUs carry sales, reviews, ranking, inventory, and internal ownership. In most cases, the safer starting point is to protect productive legacy business and use future product roadmaps to create clearer channel roles.

Plan for the time and cost it actually takes

This creates a difficult conversation with the CEO because the company has to spend money on systems, integrations, people, inventory, and operational learning well before the new marketplace produces meaningful revenue. At the same time, those investments can create risk for the Amazon business that is still paying the bills.

A single revenue forecast does not tell the CEO enough. I would rather see a downside case, a realistic case, and an upside case that show the cost and timing of getting operational, the inventory exposure, the contribution after marketplace expenses, and any potential impact on Amazon. The company can then decide how much it is willing to risk, what needs to be true before it releases the next round of funding, and how long it can reasonably wait for the channel to develop.

It also makes little sense to judge a new marketplace immediately against Amazon's share of company revenue. Amazon has years of reviews, data, infrastructure, and organizational attention behind it. Early measurements should tell the CEO whether the company is building an operation that can move orders, inventory, returns, and money accurately. Once that works consistently, the commercial results start to mean something.

Be willing to say no

Marketplace expansion is not automatically the right answer to slowing Amazon growth.

Say no, or not yet, when the company cannot explain why its products fit the channel's customer; the economics do not absorb fulfillment, returns, advertising, and added operating cost; cross-platform pricing cannot be protected; inventory is too constrained; critical processes remain dangerously manual; or nobody has authority to coordinate the work.

An invitation from a marketplace can be encouraging, especially for an Amazon brand with visible demand. It does not certify that the company is ready.