Let's talk Marketplace

35 million customers, 18 million app users – and now a marketplace of its own: with PAYBACK Produkte, customers of Germany’s largest loyalty programme can shop and pay directly in the app for the first time. Ingrid talks to Jasmin Stemig, who has spent 15 years building PAYBACK’s digital business, about what this means for sellers. In this episode: Why PAYBACK is building its own checkout alongsid...

If you follow the marketplace news item by item every week, it’s easy to lose sight of how much is shifting at the same time. That’s why Ingrid and Valerie take a step back in this episode and put October’s developments into context – partly for Valerie, who admits she has mostly just skimmed the news in recent weeks. What mattered: AI shopping: ChatGPT gets an official buy box, OTTO opens its cat...

Glass is one of the least forgiving products to sell online: it’s fragile, often heavy and not particularly expensive per piece. On top of that comes the question of who actually decides where your glasses show up online, at what price and next to which lookalike. Valerie and Ingrid discuss this with Bettina Proft. She heads e-commerce at Stölzle Lausitz, a glassmaker since 1889, and after years i...

When people talk about Turkey and Europe, they usually mean exports to Europe. Yaman Alpata of MegaMerchant sees business increasingly flowing the other way as well. He knows the market from his time at Trendyol, Hepsiburada and AliExpress, and today as a seller. With Ingrid, he discusses why Turkey is becoming attractive for European brands right now – and what they need to prepare for. In this e...

Medisana sells on around 30 marketplaces across Europe. In Benelux, however, the brand first had to learn how high Dutch customers' expectations for delivery times really are. Ingrid and Valerie talk with Martijn Paas, who knows Medisana's marketplace business inside out from his time in the Benelux team, and Patricia Lay, who helps international sellers get started on bol. In this episode: Why mo...

Does EU Regulation Work Against Shein & Temu? We Agree to Disagree — Live from DMEXCO #LTM165 A year ago, many retailers were calling on the state to rein in Temu and Shein. Valerie and Ingrid were sceptical at the time. Now the first EU rules are in force, and the question is back on the table: Is regulation actually working after all? In their first-ever live episode, recorded right in the m...

Twelve-plus in-house brands, more than 20 marketplaces, more than 20 countries – and right in the middle of it, a deliberate overhaul of the brand portfolio. Ingrid talks to Elena Cardellini of expondo about how a multi-brand business built up over years is adjusting to a new requirement: agentic commerce. It's changing how brand authority gets evaluated. How you actually steer a multi-brand busin...

What happens when a marketplace can't forecast its own inventory? Too Good To Go's Parcels business sells surplus food that only exists once it's already there – unpredictable in volume, and racing against a best-before date. In this episode, Ingrid talks to Katharina Hauke, who leads Too Good To Go Germany, and Stefan Böhler, who runs Spring GDS Germany, the logistics partner making this possible...

An iPhone, delivered in 15 minutes – not because it's urgently needed, but simply because people don't want to wait. This exact shift sits at the centre of part 2 of our China double episode: Ingrid goes deep into Instant Retail, China's answer to quick commerce, with China expert Ed Sander. The conversation covers: Why Instant Retail now accounts for 30% of Alibaba's total domestic commerce – and...

In Europe, Temu is synonymous with cheap goods – but that's exactly the image its parent company Pinduoduo now wants to shed. In this episode, Ingrid talks to China expert Ed Sander about Xinpinmu, a new private-label division with a planned investment of 100 billion yuan over three years. They discuss why Pinduoduo is hitting growth ceilings both internationally and in its home market in China, h...

Ten years after the Brexit referendum: what did leaving the EU actually do to British e-commerce? The surprising answer from Chloë Thomas – someone who has worked in every conceivable corner of UK online retail for over 20 years, from the agency side to the client side – is that hardly anyone noticed. Cross-border trade has admittedly become noticeably more complex since Brexit – customs, VAT, new...

50+ marketplaces, one company, remarkably little chaos – that's the puzzle at the heart of this episode. Daniel Müller built his career in mechanical engineering, not fashion – and today runs Leogra Trading and Leogra Services, selling across more than 50 marketplaces with 30,000 to 40,000 SKUs. Over 35% of revenue comes from Germany, with strong positions in Switzerland and the EU, plus niche mar...

Starting July 15, Amazon is requiring strict delivery standards from FBM sellers in five EU markets - 90% on-time delivery, one-day processing, or deactivation looms from September. The catch: Amazon doesn't always meet these same standards with its own FBA program. Valerie and Ingrid discuss in this news episode just how fair that really is toward sellers. They also dig into why JD.com wants its...

Is TikTok Shop an e-commerce channel or a marketing channel? Ask ten marketplace managers right now and you'll get ten different answers – and that confusion is exactly where this episode starts. Ingrid and Valerie sit down with Max Burianek, Head of TikTok Shop Germany, who built the platform's UK business before bringing it to Germany. Germany is scaling faster than the UK did at the same stage...

When German e-commerce expert Stefan Wenzel took the stage of the K5 conference last week to show a satellite photo of the Atacama Desert — where unsold fashion goes to die — you could hear a pin drop. His thesis: Sales-led commerce is broken, the numbers have proven it for years, and the industry has simply chosen not to look. Ingrid and Valerie were there in the stage hall, and they have thought...

Amazon lost 50% of its Czech e-commerce revenue. Not once — twice, in two consecutive years. That's the data point that triggered this conversation. But the more interesting story isn't Amazon's decline. It's what that decline reveals about a region that Western e-commerce still fundamentally misreads. David Cikanek is a Prague-based marketplace expert who has spent years helping brands navigate A...

The EU fined Temu €200M, France hit Shein with another penalty. Is this the turning point many in European e-commerce have been waiting for? In this episode, Ingrid and Valerie go through the most important marketplace news of the last few weeks. Their take on regulation: it works – slowly, but for real. The first genuine DSA enforcement actions against Temu and Shein are a clear signal. Amazon do...

A 130-year-old brand on a channel that didn't exist five years ago - and one of the most honest assessments of TikTok Shop you're likely to hear. Stephanie Vanderplank-Jones built Philips' TikTok Shop business in the UK from scratch and is currently expanding into Germany, France and Spain. In this episode, she explains why 80% of Philips customers spend more than two and a half hours on TikTok ev...

AI can generate an impressive product image – but can it deliver that same image, correctly named, in the right format, and on time to Zalando, About You, and Amazon simultaneously? That, says Fabio Loparco, CEO of Pixel Moda, is where the real problem lies. In this episode, Valerie speaks with Fabio about what has changed in AI-powered content production for fashion brands since September 2025. T...

Live commerce in Europe is still too often viewed through an Asian lens - and that's exactly the problem. In this episode, Ingrid sits down with Lara Day, who has been building eBay Live in Germany for the past year, six months after the official launch. They explore why the European model needs its own logic and can't simply be a watered-down version of the Asian one. They discuss why re-commerce...

Welcome back, Valerie: What a baby does to business. #LTM150 Episode 150 is a special one – and a very personal one. Valerie is back after four months of maternity leave, and to mark the anniversary, the two take a moment for an honest look behind the scenes. They talk about what it was like to steer a business through a time like this - for Ingrid, who held the wheel on her own, and for Valerie,...

In this episode the focus is on data: Ingrid speaks with Friedrich Schwandt, co-founder of ECDB, about current developments in the global marketplace landscape. At the centre are new insights into market concentration, the growth of 3P models, and shifting dynamics among leading platforms. They discuss why 84% of global e-commerce revenue now flows through marketplaces and how power structures wit...

Pricing on marketplaces is no longer just an operational lever. In this episode, Ingrid talks to Alexander Ioffe (Dimax Group) and Mateusz Wrobel (base) about the reality behind repricing and automation. It becomes clear that prices are shaped by a combination of factors: competition, platform logic, availability, margins and strategic goals - and often also by dynamics within a brand’s own distri...

Kaufland is often seen as a price-driven marketplace - and that is exactly why many brands underestimate it. In this episode, Ingrid and Valerie talk to Jan Weiß from Sleeping and Markus Anstotz from Kaufland Global Marketplace about how brands actually succeed on Kaufland - beyond the usual assumptions. At the core is the question of where brand building really happens on such a marketplace. Visi...

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 document...