Availability Is Marketing: A Smarter Approach to Ecommerce Growth

When we attended BigSummit 2024, one idea kept coming up in conversations about ecommerce growth: availability is marketing. 

At first, that can sound like a supply-chain statement. But the more we thought about it, the more useful it became. 

Marketing can create demand. Your ecommerce site can deliver a strong buying experience. But if customers can’t find the right product when they’re ready to shop—or the product isn’t actually available when they get there—you may still lose the sale. 

That makes availability bigger than inventory. It includes where your products can be discovered, whether your product information is accurate, whether your systems can support the channel, and whether your operations can reliably fulfill the demand you’re creating. 

The goal isn’t to sell everywhere. It’s to be available in the places that matter to your customers and that your business can support well. 

What “availability is marketing” means 

Ecommerce teams often think about growth primarily in terms of bringing more customers to the website. That makes sense: your owned storefront gives you more control over the experience, customer relationship, and economics of the transaction. 

But customers don’t always begin—or end—their buying journey there. 

They may discover products through search engines, marketplaces, social platforms, retail media, industry-specific channels, or increasingly through AI-assisted research and shopping experiences. 

That changes the growth question. 

Instead of asking only, “How do we drive more people to our site?” it can also be useful to ask: 

Where are our customers already looking for products like ours? 

Which of those channels make sense for our business? 

Are the right products available there? 

Is the product information good enough to help someone make a decision? 

Can our inventory and fulfillment operation support the demand if the channel works? 

Those questions turn channel expansion from a marketing tactic into a broader commerce strategy. 

A lesson we had to apply to our own ecommerce business 

One reason this idea stuck with us is that we weren’t listening only as an ecommerce agency. We were also listening as an ecommerce operator. 

Brilliance owns Norsland Lefse, an ecommerce food business that we migrated from Wix to BigCommerce. That means ideas about channel strategy don’t stay theoretical for us. We have to decide whether they’re practical for a real business with inventory, margins, fulfillment requirements, customer-service needs, and limited resources. 

Coming out of BigSummit, one of our questions was whether Norsland should make more of its products available outside its primary storefront. 

But “let’s add more channels” isn’t a strategy by itself. 

We have to consider questions like: 

Where are Norsland customers actually discovering and buying specialty foods? 

Which products make sense for each channel? 

How will inventory stay accurate if the same products are being sold in several places? 

What fees and margins does the channel introduce? 

Can the fulfillment operation support additional order volume? 

Who will maintain the product information? 

And how will we know whether the incremental reach is creating enough value to justify the added complexity? 

Those are the same kinds of questions we recommend clients ask before expanding their own channel footprint. 

More channels don’t automatically mean more growth 

There’s an important distinction between being available and trying to be everywhere. 

A new marketplace or sales channel can create additional reach, but it can also introduce new costs and operational requirements. 

You may need to manage different product assortments, fees, pricing rules, promotions, customer expectations, fulfillment requirements, returns, and data formats. Your team may also have another place where inventory and product information need to stay current. 

So the right question isn’t: 

“How many channels can we add?” 

It’s: 

“Which channels put us in front of the right customers, and can we support those channels well enough to create a good experience and a sustainable business outcome?” 

Sometimes the best decision is expansion. Sometimes it’s improving the channels you already have. 

Product data is part of availability 

Getting a product onto another channel is only the beginning. 

The information attached to that product also has to work in the environment where the customer encounters it. 

A title that works well on your website may not be ideal for a marketplace. A product may need different attributes for Google Shopping. Another channel may require specific identifiers, categories, image formats, or availability data. 

If that information is incomplete or inaccurate, the product can technically be “available” without being easy to discover or buy. 

That’s why product-data management becomes increasingly important as channel count grows. 

Feedonomics, now part of the broader Commerce organization alongside BigCommerce and Makeswift, addresses this problem by helping businesses optimize and distribute product data to advertising platforms, marketplaces, and other destinations. 

The underlying lesson applies whether or not Feedonomics is part of your stack: channel expansion creates a product-data problem that needs to be owned. 

Someone has to make sure the right product information reaches the right destination in the right format—and stays accurate as the catalog changes. 

Availability is expanding beyond traditional channels 

The definition of product discovery is also changing. 

Customers increasingly use AI tools to research products, compare options, and make buying decisions. Commerce platforms and product-data providers are responding by finding ways to make structured product information available to those new discovery experiences. 

That doesn’t mean every ecommerce business needs an “AI commerce strategy” tomorrow. 

But it does reinforce a broader point: your storefront is no longer the only place where product information may influence a purchase. 

The cleaner and more structured your product data is, the better prepared you are as discovery expands across search engines, marketplaces, social platforms, and emerging AI experiences. 

What Catalyst and Makeswift change about storefront agility 

Another theme from BigSummit 2024 was the growing connection between BigCommerce, Catalyst, and Makeswift. 

That relationship has continued to develop. BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift are now part of the Commerce parent brand, and Catalyst remains an actively developed storefront framework. 

What’s interesting isn’t simply that BigCommerce offers another storefront option. It’s the problem Catalyst and Makeswift are trying to solve together. 

Headless commerce can give development teams more control over the frontend architecture, but it can also create a new problem: marketing teams may become more dependent on developers for everyday content and experience changes. 

Catalyst uses a modern React and Next.js storefront architecture, while Makeswift provides a visual editing layer. Together, they’re designed to give development teams greater frontend flexibility without requiring marketers to open a development ticket every time they want to change a page. 

That’s a useful balance for the right organization. 

But as with any headless approach, more flexibility can also mean more technical ownership. The question isn’t whether a modern architecture is inherently better. It’s whether the additional control solves problems that matter enough to justify the development and maintenance involved. 

Availability isn’t just a marketing responsibility 

One of the strongest reminders from BigSummit was that ecommerce growth can’t sit entirely within the marketing team. 

That’s especially true when availability is part of the strategy. 

Marketing may identify a promising new channel and generate demand. But other teams determine whether the business can deliver on that promise. 

Operations and fulfillment need to know whether orders can be processed efficiently. 

Supply chain needs visibility into inventory and replenishment. 

IT needs the systems and integrations to keep products, orders, and inventory aligned. 

Ecommerce teams need to make sure the buying experience works. 

Sales and customer service often know where existing customers encounter friction. 

Finance may need to understand the economics of a new channel. 

Those responsibilities don’t have to belong to separate departments in every organization. The important point is that someone needs to own each part of the process. 

Availability crosses organizational boundaries because getting a product discovered, purchased, and delivered crosses organizational boundaries. 

Your systems have to support the promise 

Channel expansion can expose weaknesses in the technology stack very quickly. 

If inventory is updated manually across several channels, overselling becomes more likely. 

If pricing is maintained in different systems without clear ownership, customers may see inconsistent information. 

If order data doesn’t flow reliably into the ERP or fulfillment environment, additional demand may create more manual work rather than less. 

This is why we recommend evaluating the operating model behind a new channel before treating it as a marketing launch. 

Some useful questions include: 

Which system owns product data? 

Which system owns inventory? 

Where does pricing come from? 

How do orders move into fulfillment? 

How frequently does information need to synchronize? 

What happens when an integration fails? 

Who notices—and who fixes it? 

The goal isn’t to eliminate every possible exception. It’s to understand whether your systems can support the experience you’re promising customers. 

Where we’d look first 

If you’re thinking about expanding your ecommerce presence, we’d evaluate four areas before adding another channel. 

1. Discovery

Where are your customers actually researching and buying products? 

Don’t assume a channel is important simply because it’s large. Look at your audience, product category, buying process, margins, and competitive environment. 

2. Product data

Do you have the titles, descriptions, attributes, identifiers, imagery, pricing, and availability information each destination requires? 

If product information is already difficult to maintain on your own site, adding more destinations will usually make that problem more visible. 

3. Inventory and fulfillment

Can you confidently tell customers what is available and fulfill the orders that result? 

That includes understanding inventory synchronization, order routing, shipping requirements, returns, and any channel-specific service expectations. 

4. Operations

Do your systems and teams have a sustainable way to manage the channel after launch? 

Consider integrations, reporting, customer service, catalog maintenance, ownership, and the economics of the channel—not just the implementation effort. 

If those four pieces line up, expansion may be worth pursuing. If they don’t, the better investment may be strengthening the foundation first. 

What we still take away from BigSummit 

Big Summit gave us a lot to think about. 

One of the themes we noticed at BigSummit 2024—the increasingly close relationship among BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift—has become even more pronounced since the event. Those products are now unified under the Commerce parent brand, and the event itself has evolved into Commerce Live. 

But the product announcements aren’t what stayed with us most. 

The more durable takeaway was a broader way of thinking about ecommerce growth. 

Growth isn’t only about generating more traffic for the website you already have. 

It’s about understanding where customers want to discover and purchase products, deciding which of those opportunities make sense for your business, and making sure the product data, inventory, technology, fulfillment, and people behind the experience can support them. 

That’s what makes availability a marketing issue—and an operations issue, a technology issue, and ultimately a business strategy issue. 

Build an availability strategy your business can support 

The goal isn’t to be everywhere. 

It’s to be available in the places that create value for your customers and your business. 

That may mean adding a marketplace. Improving product feeds. Making inventory more reliable. Expanding to a new storefront. Preparing product data for emerging discovery channels. Or deciding that your current channels deserve more attention before you add another one. 

A practical next step is to start with the customer journey and work backward. 

Where are customers looking? 

What do they need to find? 

Can they buy it there? 

And can your business deliver on the experience consistently? 

If you’re trying to expand beyond your current storefront, Brilliance can help you evaluate where your customers are buying, what your systems need to support, and which opportunities are actually worth pursuing. 

The goal isn’t to add channels for the sake of reach. It’s to build an availability strategy your business can operate successfully over time.