Selling online used to follow a predictable playbook: launch a direct-to-consumer website, add one or two major retail partners and run digital ad campaigns to drive traffic.
Today, that playbook is no longer enough.
Consumers are now discovering products through a growing mix of channels, including marketplaces, retail media networks, social commerce and AI-powered shopping assistants.
Marketplaces are an increasingly important part of that mix, accounting for 83.4% of worldwide eCommerce GMV (opens in a new tab).
For brands, the opportunity is clear: show up wherever customers browse, compare and buy. The challenge is less visible. Every new channel adds another set of product requirements, processes and operational decisions.
Mirakl Connect (opens in a new tab) helps brands expand their reach without multiplying the work behind the scenes, giving them one place to discover channels, prepare listings and manage multichannel operations.
The hidden cost of scaling across channels
Expanding to new marketplaces sounds simple in theory: identify a channel (opens in a new tab), upload your catalog and start selling. In practice, every new sales channel introduces friction.
Each marketplace operates with its own standards:
- Product taxonomy and category hierarchies differ across every platform.
- Required attributes, character limits and metadata structures conflict.
- Image specifications require distinct crops, background treatments and resolutions.
- International channels demand localized translations and currency adjustments.
Managing these disparities across disconnected spreadsheets, custom scripts and isolated channel integrations turns high-potential sales opportunities into operational friction.
Catalog onboarding alone often stretches between eight and 16 weeks. In fact, Mirakl data (opens in a new tab) shows that catalog management accounts for up to 50% of the entire seller onboarding workload.
The cost is more than a delayed launch. Research shows that 83% of shoppers (opens in a new tab) will abandon a product page and turn to a competitor if they cannot find the product information they need.
If product data is incomplete or inconsistent, brands can lose revenue before a product ever goes live.
Your one connection to multichannel selling
Mirakl Connect (opens in a new tab) gives brands a central platform for modern marketplace commerce. It provides access to more than 450 global marketplaces and brings channel management into one workflow.
Many sellers first encounter Mirakl technology when they join a marketplace powered by Mirakl. The marketplace uses Mirakl's marketplace technology to run its operations, including a dedicated seller back office for day-to-day activities.
Mirakl Connect is a separate product that complements these individual marketplace connections, giving brands one central place to manage their presence across Mirakl-powered and other sales channels.
Brands connect their core eCommerce infrastructure once, whether they use Shopify, Adobe Commerce, an ERP or a PIM system. From there, they can manage product data, inventory, orders and customer interactions across channels.
The platform supports the work in three areas: finding the right channels, getting products ready to sell and turning channel data into better decisions.
1. Find and unlock the right channels
Expanding your channel mix should never require endless cold outreach or opaque application forms.
Mirakl Connect provides direct access to a global ecosystem of marketplaces and retailers across fashion, home, consumer electronics, beauty and many more categories.
Built-in networking tools help brands discover vetted channels tailored to their specific vertical, geography and positioning through curated channel selection.
Direct connection requests create a shorter path to retail operators looking for specific products. At the same time, platform visibility helps operators discover brands and start partnership discussions directly.
Instead of spending months searching for the right commercial contacts, teams can evaluate opportunities, connect with operators and build partnerships in days.
2. Sell on more channels with AI-powered listings
Once a brand partners with a new channel, the true operational hurdle begins: adapting existing product data to fit the new channel's strict standards.
Mirakl Connect's Channel Manager automates listing preparation through purpose-built AI.
Adapt product data to each marketplace
Catalog Transformer (opens in a new tab) helps teams prepare product data for each marketplace. It analyzes product information, maps attributes to the destination marketplace's taxonomy and fills missing values using context from product descriptions and titles.
For international expansion (opens in a new tab), AI translation adapts listings into regional languages without sending each listing through a separate localization workflow.
Health and beauty brand Skin Research (opens in a new tab) scaled across more than 10 marketplaces without expanding its team, unifying over 500 products across titles, descriptions, prices and inventory, in one place.
"Catalog Transformer has been really important for us. It allows us to have everything unified across all marketplaces, product titles, descriptions, prices and inventory, all at once," said Steve Jameson, Head of Marketplaces and Key Account Manager at Skin Research.
Make product images marketplace-ready
Marketplaces also set different standards for product imagery. One may require a pure white background, while another may specify padding, aspect ratio or color profile.
Image Transformation (opens in a new tab) automatically resizes, crops, removes backgrounds and optimizes product images for each channel. Brands such as Baltic Børn use the tool to prepare retail-ready photos without repeated manual design work.
"Catalog Transformer already optimized our product attributes for every marketplace. Now with AI Image Transformation, our visuals are automatically reformatted too, so every product in our catalog goes live faster, fully compliant, on any channel," said Danielle Davis, Merchandising specialist at Baltic Børn.
Unify orders, inventory and customer care
Getting products live is only half the job. Fulfillment and customer care determine whether a channel continues to perform.
Mirakl Connect centralizes inventory synchronization, pricing rules, order management and customer messaging across connected channels.
That shared workflow helps Spanish furniture manufacturer Angel Cerdá (opens in a new tab) manage more than 50 European marketplaces and 500 active products with a team of four. Marketplace sales now represent 70% of the company's total revenue.
"When you grow your channels, you need more capability to handle them. Mirakl Connect lets us manage all our marketplaces in one place. It's very easy to manage all the catalogs, orders and customer messages," said Diego Sierra, Marketplace Manager at Angel Cerdá.
3. Turn channel data into strategic decisions
Managing multiple channels should not mean piecing together fragmented dashboards.
Mirakl Connect brings data from across your marketplace footprint into Business Insights, so commercial teams can decide where to focus inventory, time and investment.
- Growth and revenue trends: Track sales velocity, average order value and channel contribution in real time.
- Assortment performance: Instantly identify top-performing SKUs, underperforming variants and channel-specific demand patterns.
- Operational SLA monitoring: Track order fulfillment times, incident rates and customer inquiry responses to protect seller ratings and maintain top placement across every marketplace.
With a shared view of performance, teams can spend less time reconciling channel discrepancies and more time responding to demand where margins and growth potential are strongest.
Prepare your catalog for agentic commerce
The next shift in eCommerce is already underway. Shoppers are beginning to use AI platforms that can search, compare and purchase on their behalf. In that environment, structured product data becomes even more important.
An AI agent can only recommend what it can understand. If a product's dimensions, materials, compatibility or certifications are missing or inconsistent, the product may never enter the conversation.
Agentic Activation (opens in a new tab) helps brands make product data easier for AI systems to discover, understand and act on:
- Catalog enrichment for AI discovery: Through Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) (opens in a new tab), Agentic Activation structures product listings with the contextual attributes, media metadata and clear descriptions that large language models need to understand and recommend products.
- Direct selling on AI platforms: Beyond discovery, the platform provides a single connection to surface real-time pricing, inventory availability and delivery promises on AI platforms, so shoppers can buy within conversational experiences.
Clean, structured data can help brands stay discoverable today while preparing for a new way to reach customers tomorrow.
Take your brand to the next level
Multichannel expansion should not require multiplying headcount or spending months mapping spreadsheets.
Whether you are launching your first new channel or scaling across dozens of global destinations, Mirakl Connect brings multichannel operations into one platform.
Brands can find new opportunities, get products ready faster and manage the work that follows.
Ready to expand your reach without adding more operational work? Explore Mirakl Connect (opens in a new tab) or contact our team (opens in a new tab) to see how your brand can launch faster and sell on more channels.
