Nike has severed a deal with the e-commerce giant that has lasted over the last two years. As part of the deal Nike agreed to wholesale many of its products directly to Amazon to be re-sold on the e-commerce platform. Instead, Nike wants to focus on improving the customer experience in its stores and through a direct-to-consumer experience.
Nike began its close relationship with Amazon back in 2017 when it began selling its products at wholesale to the e-commerce giant. Consumers could easily access and buy Nike products through Amazon, which the company thought would be a good opportunity to maintain its loyal customer base as retail giants struggled to get customers to visit their brick and mortar shops.
Even in e-commerce, retail has become even more fiercely competitive since Amazon, Walmart, and Target began fighting for consumer loyalty with unbeatable shipping options. For other companies that were operating outside of the Amazon and Walmart systems, sales became harder to maintain.
Succumbing to working with Amazon would have been the easy answer, save for the fact that it doesn’t answer the problem of how to get consumers into your stores. For Nike, this customer experience seems to be far more important than simply making a lot of sales on Amazon.
Nike Seeks To Focus On Other Partnerships
All of this is not to say that Nike will sever ties with every retailer it works with, though. The company expects that it will continue to work with other retailers and maintain relationships with other businesses that carry its products around the world.
In a statement to the New York Post announcing the company’s decision to leave its partnership with Amazon, Nike declared that each partnership in the future will have individual details that differentiate them from one another.
Consumers Can Still Get Nike Products On Amazon
While the company will no longer be working side by side with Amazon to sell wholesale products to the company that get re-sold on the Amazon platform, consumers will still be able to find Nike products available on the site.
Shoppers will be able to access Nike’s products through Amazon from individual sellers, they just won’t have the luxury of being able to find every product available in the same way. Odds are, though, that shoppers will not be able to tell that there’s been much of a change at all.
For Amazon, though, the loss of the contract with Nike represents a setback. The company has been working to garner a greater presence of household name brands on its platform in recent years. Still, though, it’s not likely to make much of a dent in Amazon’s already massive revenue.
