FASTRACK
WHO THEY ARE
By 2017 the marketplaces were becoming the shelf. For an established brand that had built its equity through retail, the question was no longer whether to be on Amazon and Flipkart, but whether being there on the same terms as everyone else was enough.
A brand does not lose an e-commerce category the way it loses a retail one. There is no shelf space to be pushed off. What happens instead is quieter, and that was what the study set out to find.
THE BRIEF
Observe Fastrack’s e-commerce presence across online marketplaces against competing brands, and work out what that relative presence was doing to sales.
WHAT I DID
Surveyed how Fastrack and its competitors actually appeared across e-commerce marketplaces — not just whether they were listed, but the shape of that listing: how many SKUs, how much variety, at what prices.
The pattern that emerged was that cheaper brands were flooding the marketplaces with SKUs and variety, priced at small undercuts rather than dramatic discounts.
Small undercuts matter more than large ones online. A big discount reads as inferior; a marginal one reads as the same product for slightly less — and at the moment of comparison, that is enough.
THE THINKING
Count the shelf, not the brand
On a marketplace, share of results is share of consideration. Measuring SKU volume and variety said more than measuring brand strength.
Look at the size of the undercut
A small price gap is more dangerous than a large one — it invites direct comparison instead of signalling lower quality.
Follow it through to share
The point was not that competitors were present. It was that this specific kind of presence was measurably eating into market share.