Four months after Target and Shopify teamed up to expand Target’s third-party marketplace, it didn’t make much progress. Target’s invite-only marketplace has only added 500 new sellers this year.
In June, Target partnered with Shopify to “offer a selection of its popular merchants and their products on Target Plus, the retailer’s third-party, highly curated digital marketplace.” In addition, “Target also will be the first mass retailer to work with Shopify to bring select merchants’ products into its physical stores in the months to come.” The promise that brands will go from selling on Shopify to joining the Target marketplace and finally end up on shelves in Target stores is the point of the partnership.
The partnership is invisible in the marketplace’s growth despite the millions of brands using Shopify. Few brands applied to sell on Target; presumably, many weren’t approved because, since June, Target added less than 250 new sellers (only some of which were from Shopify). Target makes the determination based on qualifications beyond U.S.-only and basic good business standing requirements seen on other marketplaces, like how the seller’s assortment fits the broader Target selection.
Target’s marketplace launched in 2019 and has remained highly selective about the sellers it allows to join. According to Marketplace Pulse data, more than five years after its launch, it still has just 1,325 sellers — double from twelve months ago, but hundreds or even thousands of times less than Amazon and Walmart marketplaces. Target’s marketplace is deliberately tiny, and the Shopify partnership didn’t change that.
However, Target’s marketplace stands out precisely because it is tiny. Target.com website is only three times less popular than Walmart.com by visitor count, but Walmart has a hundred times more sellers. Also, Target’s selection is curated and less overwhelming than the infinite isles of hundreds of millions of products on Walmart and Amazon. Target could open the gates, but it has a differentiated position because it doesn’t.
