An official Amazon Nike collaboration is set to open doors for more brands to offer their products to wider consumer audiences through a global competitiveness protected platform. The online retail giant is expanding aggressively to reach billions of consumers across Asian and Australian markets.
Amazon.com Inc. will begin selling Nike shoes directly through a brand-registry program designed to keep counterfeit goods off the site.
Such approach lets Nike Inc. take greater control over how its products are sold, helping ensure that knockoff shoes aren’t offered by third parties on the e-commerce marketplace.
As perfumes and sunglasses, shoes are popular products for counterfeiters, and Nike’s global brand is an especially alluring target. That has put pressure on the sports-apparel brand to monitor online sales more aggressively. Amazon Nike store is envisioned to become the most trusted place to shop for the brand’s merchandise online.
The prospect of a special relationship between the two companies poses threat to shoe retailers across the world as Amazon aggressively widens its reach. More and more people opt to shop online as it is faster and cheaper.
When brands work directly with Amazon, they can point out violations and have the counterfeit goods removed. The e-commerce giant eventually aims to use machine learning to detect knockoff products before they’re even posted to the site.
Almost 2,000 branded products are already registered in the Amazon program so far, including Victoria’s Secret, Toms, Patagonia, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble.
There are significant advantages for Nike to creating a more formal direct relationship with Amazon, like the one Amazon already has with Under Armour. For one, Nike would get direct exposure to Amazon’s massive and rapidly evolving e-commerce platform, and it would have more control over how its products are presented and sold there.
Nike would also get a more direct line to millennials, who increasingly consider Amazon their preferred destination for fashion purchases. That’s especially true for male millennials, according to a recent Goldman survey, in which they named Amazon as their favourite retailer in all categories except shoes and athletic (their #1 for those categories? Nike).
Earlier this week Amazon also launched a try-before-you-buy apparel service, Prime Wardrobe, which further enables easier decision making when it comes to buying expensive shoes and clothes online.
