AI agents are changing how products are discovered and selected - but what does that actually mean for day-to-day marketplace operations? In this episode, Ingrid speaks with AI specialist Barbara Branca about why the logic is shifting from rankings to recommendation systems - and why “good enough” product data is no longer sufficient. Barbara argues that listings are turning into decision documents: AI systems no longer operate on keywords alone, but aim to understand intent and prepare purchase decisions based on that. This requires complete, structured, and consistent data - not just within a single marketplace, but across all channels. At the same time, the conversation gets very practical: which tasks in marketplace operations can already be meaningfully automated with AI, where real time savings can be achieved, and how to get started without overhauling everything. Barbara’s recommendation: don’t start with your entire catalogue, begin with your top products and assess whether your data is truly decision-ready.

Note from the sponsor eDesk:

As soon as sellers operate across multiple marketplaces, customer support quickly becomes highly complex. Irene Epp from Pertemba described this vividly: her team handles more than 1,000 customer inquiries per day - across over 130 marketplaces worldwide. Having spent many years in customer support herself, Irene calls it the “watchdog of the company.” Together with Gareth Cummings from eDesk, she explained in podcast episode 145 how this volume can actually be managed: all messages, orders, and customer data are brought into one central inbox, marketplace SLAs are tracked, and response times stay within required limits. Routine inquiries such as shipping status or returns can be automated - allowing the team to focus on more complex cases that require real judgment. If you missed the episode, it’s definitely worth a listen:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1cKbdDr2ipbnGCwo0KmxKF

Note from the sponsor Kaufland Global Marketplace:

If you’re looking to expand your marketplace business internationally - for example to Poland or Italy - it’s worth taking a closer look at the Kaufland Global Marketplace. Through Kaufland, you can currently sell in seven European countries: Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Italy, and France. The key advantage: you can manage all marketplaces through a single account, without having to set up your products separately for each country.

We also have an interesting offer for you: With the promo code MP-UNI2026, new sellers can sell on all Kaufland marketplaces without a base fee for three months. The offer is valid until May 31, 2026.

And if you’d like to learn more about how brands can build visibility and branding on Kaufland marketplaces, make sure to tune in to our upcoming podcast episode 147. Our guests will be Markus Anstots (Kaufland), Jan Weiß and Marvin Thöne (both Sleepling).

More than 1,000 customer inquiries per day - across over 130 marketplaces worldwide. That is the reality Irene Epp from Pertemba describes in this podcast episode. Irene spent many years working in customer service herself and therefore calls support the “watchdog of the company.” It is where problems in the business become visible first: a SKU with unusually high return rates, a carrier struggling with deliveries, or customers suddenly asking the same question over and over again. Together with Gareth Cummings, CEO of eDesk, she speaks with Ingrid about why customer support in marketplace businesses is far more than an operational service function. Different platform rules, strict SLA deadlines, and customers across multiple time zones quickly make support highly complex - and responding too slowly risks not only unhappy buyers but also ranking losses on the platform. At the same time, the conversation shows why automation is becoming increasingly important: most inquiries revolve around the same topics - shipping status, returns, or tracking. Without automation, this global support reality would be almost impossible to manage.

Note from the sponsor bol:

King’s Day on April 27 is one of the most important retail moments in the Netherlands. Together with our partner bol, the country’s largest online marketplace, we analysed which products actually perform around this occasion - and why occasion commerce is about much more than simply offering “orange items.” Successful sellers plan their campaigns early, clearly separate occasion-driven assortments from evergreen products, and pay particular attention to delivery capability. In the Netherlands, next-day delivery is the standard expectation - and if that reliability is missing, customers quickly switch to another seller. The same dynamics apply to other seasonal peaks such as Back-to-School or major sports events. You can find the full deep dive here on Marketplace Universe. https://marketplace-universe.com/kings-day-in-the-netherlands/

Note from the sponsor Front Row:

Customers don’t experience brands in channels - they experience one continuous journey: from discovery on social media to research on marketplaces and finally to purchase. In its new Connected Commerce Guide, our partner Front Row explains how brands can connect Amazon, D2C, retail media and CRM instead of optimizing each channel in isolation. The guide shows why focusing only on short-term metrics like ROAS can hide the real impact marketplaces have on overall customer lifetime value. It also includes practical frameworks and a quick self-check to help brands understand how connected their own commerce setup really is. You can download the guide for free here! https://www.frontrowgroup.de/insight/connected-commerce-guide/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=omr&utm_campaign=connected-commerce-guide

How does a DTC brand build a scalable marketplace business? In this episode, Ingrid speaks with Adrien Gosteli and Sebastian Thalheim from KoRo, as well as Lucas Bassa from Channable, about the food brand’s journey from a DTC startup to a marketplace player. Today, KoRo sells on Amazon, eBay, Kaufland and Galaxus, and is preparing launches on Decathlon and TikTok Shop - but building this business turned out to be far more operational than many brands expect.

The guests offer a rare look into the “engine room” behind marketplace growth: from flatfiles, variant logic and listing rejections to the specific challenges of the food category, such as FBA requirements and expiration dates. They discuss how KoRo uses marketplaces to test new markets, why product data and content cannot simply be copied from platform to platform, and why data quality, reliable order synchronization and automation become critical as assortments grow and new marketplaces are added.

The conversation also explores what it takes to build a scalable setup: automated data rules, order synchronization, repricing logic, and how tools like Channable can help reduce operational complexity. A practical look at why marketplace expansion is often less about marketing - and more about infrastructure.

Note from the sponsor Pixelmoda:

Founded in Milan in 2021, Pixelmoda specializes in AI-assisted image and video production. The key feature is that the AI does not generate the images, but supports the team and models in taking the best possible shots quickly by optimizing camera position, lightning, model poses, and so on. This significantly shortens production time and reduces costs up to 70 % for photo production and up to 90 % for video production. Pixelmoda produces over 14 million images and videos per year. Its customers include over 100 brands from more than 20 countries, including three of the top five global online marketplaces and lots of luxury brands. If you want to know more, listen once again our episode 126 with Gianni Serazzi from Pixelmoda. https://marketplace-universe.com/captivate-podcast/image-ai-for-fashion-what-it-can-and-cant-do-ltm126/

“Peak Amazon” is back. The recurring narrative suggests that Amazon has passed its zenith – saturated markets, slowing growth, eroding dominance. Yet with USD 717 billion in revenue in 2025, surpassing Walmart for the first time, the data paints a more complex picture.

In this family & friends news episode, Ingrid is joined by Andrea Engelmann (OnMacon) to question whether we are really seeing structural limits - or simply strategic prioritisation. The Netherlands serves as a case in point: Amazon is investing €1.4 billion in logistics, infrastructure and visibility, and has already overtaken bol in search visibility. The idea of “romantic local heroes” standing firm against global giants sounds appealing - but when Amazon decides a market matters, power dynamics shift quickly.

Beyond the Peak debate, they discuss TikTok Shop’s $100 billion GMV milestone, the rise of Roblox as a Gen Z commerce environment, Reddit exploring community-driven commerce, regulatory pressure on the Buy Box, and the open question of how AI agents will reshape platform control.

A focused conversation about shifting ecosystems - and why “peak” may be the wrong lens to assess what’s happening.

Note from the sponsor Channable:

Different feeds, different platform requirements, manual workarounds - and a lack of transparency. Does this everyday chaos in marketplace operations sound familiar? Then the next podcast episode is exactly what you need.

We talk to the drugstore brand KoRo about precisely this chaos, and how to bring it to an end. KoRo is known for its natural food products and now sells across multiple channels: brick-and-mortar retail, its own online shop, and marketplaces such as Amazon and Kaufland. Adrien Gosteli from KoRo will explain how the team structured its marketplace activities and brought operational complexity back under control. The case is supported by Lucas Bassa, Product Lead Marketplaces at Channable. If you are responsible for marketplaces, want to scale your company, or are already operating at an expert level, make sure to tune in next week - this case will be well worth it.

Connected Commerce - just another buzzword? In this episode, it quickly becomes clear that it is about much more than a trend. Ingrid speaks with Janine Hummel and Daniel Zemitzsch from Front Row about why many brands still think in channels while customers have long moved on to journeys. Budgets and KPIs are typically channel-driven, whereas the customer journey jumps between TikTok, Amazon, D2C shops and AI agents. As long as the last touchpoint receives all the credit, teams will inevitably optimise against each other - not out of bad intent, but because the system is designed that way. The central question of the episode is therefore: Who actually takes responsibility for the overall interplay, rather than just a single channel? And how do you make budget and prioritisation decisions when data is never complete? An episode about Connected Commerce not as a tool debate, but as an organisational and leadership challenge.

If you want to know more, download the Front Row white paper "Connected Commerce" here: connected-commerce.com

Note from the sponsor bol:

If you’re planning to expand into the Netherlands, here’s the reality: Next Day Delivery isn’t a competitive edge - it’s the entry ticket. In a market dominated by bol, “order today, deliver tomorrow” is the baseline expectation. But speed alone won’t secure long-term success. What truly matters is reliability. Delivery performance is measured precisely, and platforms translate those metrics directly into visibility and ranking requirements. What this means in practice for international sellers, why Next Day Delivery alone isn’t enough, and which common mistakes still cost brands performance in the Dutch market is outlined in our latest blog post Logistics as Market Access: What Sellers Really Need to Deliver in the Dutch Market.

JD.com is acquiring Ceconomy - and from a European perspective, the deal raises far more questions than the headlines suggest. In this episode, Ingrid takes a deep dive with China expert Ed Sander. They discuss why JD is not treating Europe as a growth adventure, but as a strategic detour. They unpack why JD’s own platform experiments such as Joybuy and Ochama failed in Europe, why trust and localisation are decisive here - and why Ceconomy is less a retail asset for JD than a distribution shortcut. The episode also focuses on the growing negotiating power of Chinese players that bundle Western and Chinese brand volumes - with tangible consequences for prices, margins, and market structures. An episode about structural shifts in European commerce - and why this deal should be understood as a signal rather than a one-off.

The marketplace landscape is changing rapidly - not through isolated innovations, but through a fundamental redistribution of control. TikTok is building its own logistics infrastructure in Europe, Google is opening up agent-based commerce via the Universal Commerce Protocol, Amazon and eBay are closing their catalogs to AI agents, OpenAI is introducing a new fee tier with Instant Checkout, and Temu continues to grow through radical control over prices and processes. In this news episode, Ingrid joins Marcus Höhne, entrepreneur in a family business and long-time marketplace practitioner, to examine what these developments mean from a retailer's perspective. Together, they discuss where operational complexity is really increasing—and where it is merely being shifted, when additional fees are still manageable and when margins are structurally eroding, how logistics or price control are creating new dependencies, and which platforms still offer optional access instead of implicit lock-in.

Note from the sponsor base:

Repricing on marketplaces is often seen as a margin killer. But that assumption is misleading. Base, a solution provider for marketplace integration and repricing, knows from his practical experience: It’s not repricing that’s the problem - it’s the lack of strategy behind it. On marketplaces, visibility isn’t determined by the lowest product price, but by the total offer price - including shipping, fees and overall cost logic. Without clear guardrails, automation can quickly lead to margin erosion. What’s needed are solid fundamentals: a clear definition of relevant competitors, category-specific repricing rules, minimum prices, margin thresholds - and a realistic understanding of how Buy Box mechanics actually work. That’s exactly what we break down in detail in our new blog article. Click here to learn more about repricing!

Note from the sponsor eDesk:

Marketplace customer support often feels chaotic. In reality, it is surprisingly predictable. Most tickets revolve around the same recurring questions: Where is my order? Has it shipped yet? Can I still cancel? When teams answer these requests manually, they are not doing customer support - they are doing administrative work. At significant cost. eDesk addresses exactly this problem. As a helpdesk solution built specifically for marketplace and multichannel sellers, eDesk connects the inbox directly to more than 300 marketplaces - from Amazon and eBay to Mirakl and Kaufland. Instead of simply centralizing messages, it adds context: order status, tracking data, and relevant marketplace information are immediately available and can be answered automatically. Less tab switching, less copy-pasting, and more reliable SLAs. Which ten support questions account for the majority of all tickets - and how they can be automated - is detailed in our new Deep Dive “Marketplace Support Reality".

Why is cross-border expansion so hard for marketplaces - even when the technology is ready? In this episode, Ingrid flips the usual seller-centric perspective and looks at internationalisation from the operator’s side. She is joined by Valentin Lennartz from OnBuy and Paul Cotsas from Octopia to unpack the classic chicken-and-egg problem of supply, sellers, and demand. They discuss why “start with supply, then marketing” is more than a mantra, how seller quality and loyalty become strategic assets in new markets, and why aggregation doesn’t have to lead to interchangeable marketplaces. The conversation also touches on Germany as a particularly competitive market, the growing selectivity of sellers, and why speed only works when the foundation is right. A practical, operator-level discussion for anyone building or scaling marketplaces across borders.

Note from the sponsor Pixelmoda:

Marketplaces love video. But for many brands, video production still feels like a problem: expensive, slow, and almost impossible to scale. Which is why, on marketplaces, video often ends up being reserved for hero products only. And that’s exactly where things are changing. Tools like Pixelmoda use AI to turn a small set of existing product images into photorealistic video sequences. No cutting. No long production cycles. The result is video that finally scales across the assortment. And more sales without higher costs. If you want to know more about how this works, check out our blog post on the topic or listen to the podcast with Gianni Serazzi from Pixelmoda.