For many ecommerce brands, Amazon is the engine that fuels growth. It delivers scale, demand, and operational simplicity, making it the default launchpad for digital commerce. But as brands mature, relying too heavily on a single marketplace limits long-term growth and resilience. This is when expanding into off-Amazon marketplaces like Home Depot, Lowe’s, or Walmart becomes a strategic imperative.
In this article, we explore why leading ecommerce brands are expanding beyond Amazon, the common challenges they face when entering new marketplaces, and the strategies that enable successful, incremental growth. Through real-world examples, it demonstrates how thoughtful off-Amazon expansion can strengthen overall performance, reduce risk, and unlock new opportunities for long-term scale.
Why Brands Should Expand Beyond Amazon
Amazon is powerful, but it isn’t designed to support every growth objective forever. Limiting your brand to just one marketplace (no matter how large that marketplace is) only works towards capping growth potential and isolating your audience. Brands that remain Amazon-only often encounter:
- Rising acquisition costs and margin pressure from competitive ad auctions and platform fees
- Algorithm dependency, where small changes can materially impact visibility and revenue
- Limited control over brand presentation and pricing
- Growth plateaus once core keywords and categories are saturated
Off-Amazon marketplaces unlock new demand pools, diversify revenue streams, and reduce platform concentration risk. Just as importantly, they introduce brands to customers who may never shop on Amazon for certain categories. This is especially true in categories like home improvement, specialty retail, and large-format goods.
Common Challenges of Off-Amazon Expansion
Despite the upside, marketplace expansion is rarely simple. While the opportunity to unlock new demand and diversify revenue is compelling, many ecommerce leaders underestimate the operational, technical, and strategic complexity involved in launching and scaling beyond Amazon. What works on one marketplace does not automatically translate to another, and assumptions carried over from Amazon can quickly become liabilities elsewhere.
Off-Amazon channels operate with different algorithms, merchandising standards, fulfillment expectations, and customer behaviors. Brands must adapt how they manage inventory, promotions, and performance reporting. Without a clear plan, this complexity can slow execution and dilute results.
Channel Fragmentation
Each marketplace has its own rules, algorithms, content standards, fulfillment expectations, and pricing dynamics. What works on Amazon rarely translates directly to Home Depot or Lowe’s.
How to Fix It: Treat each marketplace as a distinct growth channel. Winning off Amazon requires channel-specific strategies—tailored content, pricing models, and fulfillment approaches aligned to each platform’s shopper behavior and expectations.
Operational Overhead
Managing inventory, content, compliance, and performance across multiple platforms can quickly strain internal teams—especially for lean organizations.
How to Fix It: Align operations before scaling. Inventory planning, fulfillment speed, and customer experience must be ready before launch. Expansion amplifies both strengths and weaknesses.
Fear of Cannibalization
A persistent myth holds that expanding into new channels simply redistributes existing sales. Many brands hesitate, worried that Amazon growth will suffer as new marketplaces ramp.
How to Fix It: Build for incremental growth and not redistribution. The goal is additive demand. Successful brands monitor incremental GMV by channel to ensure growth compounds rather than cannibalizes.
Limited Marketplace Relationships
Smaller or emerging brands often struggle to gain attention or resolve issues quickly without established channel relationships.
How to Fix It: Leverage experienced marketplace partners. Strategic partners with established marketplace relationships can accelerate launches, optimize performance, and resolve issues faster than brands can on their own.
Off-Amazon Marketplace Expansion in Action
The idea that Amazon must lose for other channels to win simply isn’t true. Real-world results prove that multi-channel growth can strengthen every channel when executed correctly.
Michigan Peat: Multi-Channel Growth Without Tradeoffs
Michigan Peat demonstrates how thoughtful expansion can drive incremental growth. After launching on Amazon in 2021, the brand achieved a 155% CAGR. In 2023, the brand expanded to Home Depot, managing to still grow Amazon sales by ~20% that same year.
Rather than redistributing demand, Home Depot delivered equal GMV alongside Amazon. Since then, both channels have continued to grow in parallel, each achieving a 120% CAGR, decisively debunking the myth that Amazon must always dominate or suffer when new channels are added.
Rev-A-Shelf: Sustained Growth Across Retail Marketplaces
Rev-A-Shelf illustrates the power of long-term, well-managed marketplace partnerships. Since expanding into Home Depot and Lowe’s in 2020, the brand has delivered five consecutive years of YoY growth, achieving a 150% CAGR on both channels.
Through close collaboration, proactive optimization, and rapid issue resolution supported by strong channel relationships, Rev-A-Shelf transformed complex retail marketplaces into durable growth engines.
Expanding beyond Amazon is about building a stronger, more resilient ecommerce business. Brands that approach marketplace expansion strategically unlock new demand, reduce risk, and extend their growth curve without sacrificing performance where it already exists. Don’t treat expansion as an experiment. Instead, view it as a disciplined, data-driven growth strategy—one that compounds over time.
Growth Marketing Specialist
