Dear Max Retailers,
I’m Melodie, Co-founder and CEO at Max Retail. My background is as a past distributor (many of you know me personally from my time as a road rep) and an independent retailer of nine years. Our passionate team is composed of past brand executives, retail associates, and top technology leaders.
We work with independent retailers and brands selling price points ranging from Mid-tier all the way to Designer. For this reason, we have sales channels that cater to selling $30 items and completely different channels for selling $3,000 items.
After sharing our update on new sales channels launched, a number of sellers inquired about how we allocate inventory. So we wanted to share that process with you.
It starts with sales channel prospecting. When considering new sales channels, we look at the assortment currently listed on Max Retail and evaluate what inventory has the slowest time to sell, and the weakest sell-through. We review brands, price points and categories, the same way you evaluate your merchandise in-store. The difference is, for you as a retailer, you stop buying the poor performers. For us at Max Retail, it’s about leaning in — and finding the best e-commerce sites who have the right audience to ensure unsold inventory will sell, and confirm that the opportunity will benefit a large number of our sellers.
Then, we see if the sales channel is a good fit in every other aspect. This is where we get to know their leadership and merchandising teams, review their core values and ethics, confirm the size of their customer base, understand their customer personas and ask about their company goals to ensure alignment.
If all this checks out, we move into a technical deep dive. This is the hardest part of launching a new sales channel. Each and every channel has different requirements for selling on them and we have to custom build new features so that your inventory can be successfully listed on them. This is what makes Max Retail valuable to you; opportunity for channel expansion without any extra workload on you.
Next, we move into assortment planning. Once an integration is built to provide an inventory feed to the new sales channel, we consider the exact assortment that is relevant to the channel and their customer base; thoughtful merchandising is always the goal.
We consider what brands, categories and pricepoints are already selling on the channel currently that are identical to, or otherwise hang next to, the brands on Max Retail. This is done via a mix of industry experts and AI.
The actual assortment that ends up listed on a channel depends on our ability to meet their requirements.
→ Approved Brands: Brands identified to be a clear, confident fit are connected to the channel and all other brands are excluded from it. Example; a Contemporary brand will never be listed on Walmart and a mid-tier brand will never be listed on Vestiaire Collective. How much of the approved brands that get listed on a channel are subject to the next three variables
→ Product Attributes: This is the trickiest requirement! When sellers list on Max Retail with basic product info, Max Retail does the rest. We enhance product descriptions through a mix of web scraping, human effort, and AI to fill out as many attributes as possible, from neckline to sleeve length, inseam to leg opening. Country of origin, fit and composition are the three most important for all our channels. When we are unable to find these critical pieces of information, inventory cannot qualify for certain channels. If you can share this info when you list, it will ensure max exposure on your inventory’s qualifying channels.
→ Seller Performance: We check each seller’s performance using historical data over a 30 day rolling period to see if they meet the expectations of the channel. For instance, if a channel requires 98% order fulfillment, then sellers who have 98% or greater order approval rating will qualify, but only the inventory that is suitable for the channel. We made a change recently that allows for multiple sellers who have the exact same style in the exact same size listed (even if their performance isn’t as high as the channel’s requirement) to list that inventory on stricter channels, because there is ‘back-stock’ from other sellers. This change has been extremely meaningful for our sellers.
→ Brand Depth and Breadth: Certain channels will only receive inventory if there are three unique sizes available of a style, and at least ten different styles of the same brand. This is where the power of Max Retail comes in again! Since we virtually aggregate the same inventory across multiple sellers, retailers are able to qualify for channels through Max Retail when they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. If we do not have that required depth or breadth, however, the inventory will not be listed, until enough of it has been listed on Max Retail. Since new inventory is sent to our sales channels daily, our assortment is constantly ebbing and flowing as sellers list more.
There are over 10k brands listed on Max Retail today. Over the last three years we’ve been serving sellers through our Drop Ship program, we’ve had less than 25 instances of brands reporting misalignment with our inventory allocation. And with each report, we refine our channel merchandising to improve its accuracy. Some misalignments actually resulted in the brands partnering with Max Retail, directly!
At Max Retail, we always carefully match your past-season inventory with the sales channels best suited to reach the right shoppers. This ensures your merchandise gets the exposure it needs to convert into cash flow and free up valuable floorspace.
We also know how important it is for you to feel comfortable with where your inventory is sold. That’s why you always have the option to:
✨ Opt out of any sales channel that doesn’t align with your business goals.
✨ Make changes anytime by emailing us at success@maxretail.com or completing this form.
As always, we carefully vet our partnerships to uphold integrity, sustainability, and your best interests. Thank you for trusting us to help you transform excess inventory into opportunity.
All my best,
Melodie van der Baan
Co-Founder & CEO Max Retail
