B&Q Marketplace Has Proven the Model. Now It Needs to Become Indispensable to the Brands that Sell on It.
14 June 2026
By Tim Dare – Commercial & Partnership Director
When B&Q launched its marketplace in 2022, it was a bold move. At the time, many retailers were still debating whether opening their digital shelves to third-party sellers would dilute their brand, create operational headaches, or simply fail to gain traction. B&Q embraced the marketplace model early, invested heavily, and has been refreshingly open about both its strategy and results. Based on its results in 2026, it’s hard not to view the initiative as a success.
The marketplace has expanded rapidly, attracting thousands of sellers and adding millions of products to the B&Q website. More importantly, it has helped B&Q grow online without taking on the inventory risk that comes with traditional retail buying. It has generated new revenue streams, increased customer choice, and brought new shoppers into the B&Q ecosystem.
The latest launch of enhanced seller profiles and dedicated seller pages is another sign that B&Q continues to invest in the platform rather than simply maintaining it. But while the marketplace story has been a success for B&Q, I’m increasingly interested in assessing the channel’s value through the lens of the brands and verified sellers listing their products on it.
B&Q has already proven the marketplace model works for retailers. The next challenge is proving it creates enough value for brands to prioritize investment over Amazon, DTC and other marketplace channels.
One of the great strengths of the marketplace model is assortment expansion. A retailer can add hundreds of thousands of products without purchasing inventory or carrying the associated risk. Customers get more choice. Retailers generate additional revenue and traffic. But, as more sellers join a marketplace and more products are added, visibility becomes a scarce resource among sellers.
In conversations I’ve had with brands over the last year, the discussion has changed. A few years ago, the question was whether B&Q Marketplace was worth testing. Today, the question is often whether further investment can be justified compared with Amazon, retail media, DTC, and a growing list of alternative marketplaces. That doesn’t mean brands are unhappy with B&Q. It means they’re becoming more selective. Every marketplace is competing not just for consumer traffic, but for a share of brand investment.
One development that caught my attention recently was B&Q’s continued expansion into categories beyond its traditional home improvement roots. Categories such as cameras and wearable technology may well prove successful. Marketplace history is full of examples where retailers expanded beyond their original focus and unlocked new growth opportunities.
However, the burden of proof is naturally higher in these areas. A customer searching for power tools, garden furniture or kitchen storage already associates those categories with B&Q. Cameras and wearable tech are different. Brands entering these newer categories need confidence that customer demand translates into sales, not simply search volume. A nulled search term can indicate interest. Conversion is what justifies investment. The challenge for any marketplace moving into adjacent categories is proving that traffic is both relevant and commercially valuable for participating brands.
The introduction of dedicated seller pages is a positive step. It will help consumers understand who they are buying from, as well as allowing Brands to tell their story and play on their existing market positioning. But is this enough to justify investment over other proven channels?
Amazon spent years building an ecosystem of tools designed specifically for brands. Brand Stores, Brand Registry, Sponsored Ads, search analytics, audience insights, attribution reporting, and category-level intelligence all serve a common purpose. Whether brands like Amazon or not is almost irrelevant at this point. The reason many continue to invest heavily is because they can measure performance, understand demand and justify decisions with data.
Seller pages improve visibility. They don’t solve the broader challenge of helping brands assess growth opportunities and ROI. As marketplaces mature, sellers increasingly expect more than product listings and transaction volume. They expect merchandising opportunities, advertising options, performance insights, and greater control over how their brands are presented.
For me, the best way to persuade brands to increase their direct investment in a marketplace channel is through data. The most successful brands I speak with no longer manage marketplaces in isolation. They are making integrated decisions across Amazon, retail, marketplaces, DTC channels, wholesale partners and retail media networks.
Revenue remains important, but increasingly it is only part of the equation. Brands also want insights. They want to understand customer demand, category trends, search behaviour, conversion performance, competitive positioning and emerging opportunities. They want data that helps them make better decisions across their entire commerce strategy, not just within a single retailer platform. A garden furniture brand deciding where to place inventory ahead of spring doesn’t just want historic sales reports. It wants to understand search demand, category growth, competitor activity and conversion trends before making those decisions.
This is where I believe retailer marketplaces have a significant opportunity. The marketplaces that provide meaningful intelligence alongside revenue will attract more investment from brands. Those that don’t risk becoming interchangeable sales channels competing primarily on traffic alone.
None of this should be interpreted as criticism of what B&Q has achieved. B&Q deserves enormous credit for recognising the marketplace opportunity early and executing against it successfully. Many retailers are only now trying to catch up.
The launch of seller profiles, dedicated seller pages and in-store Click & Collect services demonstrates that the business is continuing to invest rather than standing still. But the next phase of marketplace growth looks different. The challenge is no longer proving that marketplaces work for retailers. The winners in the next phase of marketplace growth won’t necessarily be the retailers with the most sellers or the largest catalogues. They’ll be the ones that become indispensable to brands. In my view, that means giving brands better visibility, better tools and, above all, better data.