- Nike decided to stop selling on Amazon, ending a 2017 pilot program. Bloomberg notes that the athletic brand said it will no longer sell its sneakers and apparel on the e-commerce website as it is preparing to offer a more direct customer experience.
- Big brands have left Amazon’s website due to sales of falsified goods and illegal vendors that weaken the original brands ‘ reputation. Nike said, however, that it will continue to use Amazon Web Services to support its web services and software.
Nike decided to stop selling on Amazon, ending a 2017 pilot program. Bloomberg notes that the athletic brand said it will no longer sell its sneakers and apparel on the e-commerce website as it is preparing to offer a more direct customer experience.
Only after years of watching others peddle vast quantities of their goods via Amazon’s third-party marketplace, it launched its pilot program to trial sales on site. Morgan Stanley’s 2017 survey found Adidas to be Amazon’s most-purchased clothing brand, but Nike wasn’t behind any of those sales themselves.
The strategy, which gives Nike better sales margins and allows her more brand power, has led Nike to cut back on the number of stores selling their shoes and clothes. Mostly they were smaller, independent stores and chains that Nike felt were not properly separating their goods from the ones they brought. While the organization has maintained strong ties with vendors like Foot Locker. Nike said it “will continue to invest with other retailers and networks in deep, distinctive collaborations for Nike to support our customers worldwide seamlessly.
Source- Nike.com
Nike has reportedly raised concerns about these illegal vendors in the past, as well as counterfeits on Amazon’s marketplace— a problem that caused Birkenstock’s sandal manufacturer to pull their goods from Amazon in 2016. According to a source who spoke with the Wall Street Journal at the time of the deal between Nike and Amazon, the companies were in talks for weeks before Nike agreed to supply Amazon with certain products in exchange for Amazon cracking down on third-party sales of fakes and unauthorized Nike listings. According to a 2018 analysis by research firms Coresight Research and DataWeave, the total listings for Nike products on Amazon were subsequently dropped
Yet Amazon’s inability to stem the flow of counterfeits on its platform has also continued. It launched Project Zero earlier this year, an effort to eliminate fakes from its site using strategies such as automated security and enabling brands to delete their own counterfeits. But even a quick search for Nike’s Air Force 1 sneaker on Amazon brings up complaints from customers about potential fakes.
Big brands have left Amazon’s website due to sales of falsified goods and illegal vendors that weaken the original brands ‘ reputation. Nike said, however, that it will continue to use Amazon Web Services to support its web services and software.
Nike has an immense reach and leaving Amazon won’t affect it much but it will create problems for the reputation of Amazon as an online marketplace where Amazon needs to control the piracy of branded products on the marketplace.
