Our Senior Producer, Tristan Hipper, caught up with Laura Barber, Partner Account Manager, EMEA at Linnworks, to discuss the realities of scaling on e-commerce marketplaces.
Linnworks acts as the operational control centre behind a retailer’s ecommerce business. They connect marketplaces, webstores, warehouses, carriers, 3PLs and inventory data into a single platform, so that retailers can manage orders, stock, fulfilment and shipping workflows centrally, instead of channel by channel.
What quickly became clear during the discussion – and what Linnworks’ 2026 State of Commerce Ops (SOCO) Report backs up – is that lack of demand is no longer the limiting factor for retailers. The customers are there, and the channels are multiplying. Rather, what’s holding back growth is something less visible but equally important: the operational complexity that comes with it.
Here’s what they had to say:
Linnworks sits across over 100 marketplaces and 1000s of retailers, so you must see patterns that individual sellers don’t. What are you seeing at the moment?
One of the biggest patterns we’re seeing is that marketplace growth is increasingly coming from operational maturity, rather than simply adding more channels.
Multichannel expansion is now the norm – our SOCO report shows that 60% of retailers are already selling on four or more marketplaces – but people assume that expansion means listing products everywhere possible.
In reality, if you don’t have the right level of operational capability in place, you simply won’t be able to scale effectively, and you’ll end up with chaos and complexity, not growth. Channel diversification is a growing trend, and executed effectively, it can increase resilience, but only if operations can support it.
That’s where we help, by providing a centralised platform that brings together the entirety of retailers’ operations. Instead of managing each marketplace independently, they can automate inventory syncing, orchestrate fulfilment across channels, and gain a real-time operational view of the business as they scale.
TikTok Shop has taken off as a sales channel in a very short space of time. What unique logistical challenges does social commerce create compared to traditional marketplaces like Amazon or eBay?
Social commerce massively reduces the time between discovery and purchase. When an item goes viral, it can generate thousands of orders within hours, creating very different operational pressures to more predictable marketplace demand patterns.
For retailers, the pressures include rapid inventory spikes, increased risk of overselling, higher return volumes due to impulse purchasing, and inventory conflicts when selling the same SKU across multiple channels at once.
That’s why operational agility has become a competitive advantage in social commerce, as retailers need to be able to respond to sudden spikes in demand without overselling or creating fulfilment bottlenecks.
Integrations are key here too – we have an integration with TikTok Shop, so retailers can bring TikTok fulfilment operations into the same platform they use for the rest of their marketplace ecosystem.
When a retailer sells the same SKU across multiple marketplaces with different fulfilment models, how does inventory allocation work?
That’s where inventory orchestration becomes critical. Retailers may have the same SKU spread across multiple warehouses, stores, suppliers and partners. The challenge is maintaining accurate available stock across every channel in real time while also prioritising where inventory should be allocated based on demand, delivery promises, margins or costs.
Modern inventory management is less about static stock counts and more about dynamic allocation logic. In practice, that can mean reserving inventory for high-priority marketplaces, or routing orders based on where the customer actually is geographically. During peak periods, retailers might want to protect stock for premium delivery services or prioritise fulfilment locations based on shipping cost or SLA requirements. And, as demand shifts across channels, that inventory needs to automatically rebalance in real time.
Linnworks centralises that visibility and automates the syncing, so when a product sells on one marketplace, stock levels update everywhere else automatically, reducing overselling risk and giving retailers much greater confidence as they scale.
What are the retailers that are successfully scaling across marketplaces doing that others aren’t?
Operational automation is becoming a major factor. Our SOCO report showed that 64.8% of UK retailers now operate with majority or highly automated operations. Clearly, then, automation is becoming a necessity for growth, rather than a competitive advantage.
As retailers diversify across marketplace channels, inventory visibility is becoming vital, yet our report shows only around a third of retailers say they have excellent inventory visibility across channels and warehouses. For those who don’t, scaling across marketplace channels is hard enough, let alone adding social commerce, DTC, and multiple fulfilment models simultaneously.
We also see fulfilment speed becoming a competitive differentiator beyond Amazon. Consumers increasingly expect Amazon-level delivery experiences regardless of the channel they buy from.
The retailers outperforming the market are typically the ones investing early in connected operations, automation, and fulfilment flexibility so they can scale new channels without scaling operational friction at the same pace.
You mentioned that consumers are increasingly coming to expect “Amazon-level” next-day or same-day delivery. How are marketplace sellers handling that pressure logistically?
One key change is that retailers are moving away from single-warehouse fulfilment models and building much more flexible fulfilment networks.
These networks include multi-warehouse inventory placement, regional 3PL partnerships, marketplace fulfilment services, smarter order routing, carrier diversification and hybrid fulfilment models.
Clearly, delivery expectations are directly shaping retailers’ operational strategy. Yet, at the same time, retailers are balancing speed with profitability. Finding this balance, as shipping costs increase, marketplace competition grows and delivery expectations continue to rise, is key.
In short, flexibility is becoming more important than standardisation, and many retailers are combining different fulfilment models. The operational challenge is co-ordinating all these moving parts efficiently in real time.
We find that our platform, by allowing retailers to automate fulfilment decisions and intelligently route orders based on factors like stock availability, warehouse proximity, shipping cost, or delivery SLA, significantly helps retailers to overcome this complexity.
What’s your advice for retailers to help manage the complexity that comes with running several fulfilment models across channels?
The key is orchestration and visibility. Each fulfilment model has different inventory pools, different SLAs, different costs, different operational workflows.
By centralising and automating these operations on a platform like ours, orders can be intelligently routed based on rules, helping retailers efficiently scale marketplace operations without proportionally increasing operational overhead.
Ultimately, the retailers winning in marketplaces today are the ones that can scale operational complexity as effectively as they scale sales volume.
Finally, what’s one key message people you’d like to leave people with?
Retailers can launch on new channels quickly, but sustaining profitable growth requires inventory, fulfilment, shipping, and order orchestration to operate in real time across increasingly fragmented marketplaces and fulfilment models.
Marketplace growth is no longer limited by demand – it’s limited by operational complexity. At Linnworks, we provide the operational layer that helps retailers scale marketplace revenue without scaling operational chaos. To learn how Linnworks helps retailers streamline multichannel operations, inventory, and fulfillment, book a demo with the team.
Meeting the operational challenges of marketplace expansion will be a key theme discussed during the Marketplace Logistics Forum taking place at Leaders in Logistics: Autumn (6-7 October, London). The Marketplace Logistics Forum brings together logistics leaders from e-commerce marketplaces, retailers and carriers to benchmark strategy, build relationships and solve the most pressing challenges facing the industry today.
Rise to the challenge of marketplace expansion
Don't miss The Marketplace Logistics Forum at Leaders in Logistics: Autumn
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Ellie Kennedy
Senior Business Development Executive,
Leaders in Logistics
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