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Best Buy Reboots Marketplace To Double Assortment

Plus: Stop trusting dashboards that lie to you

Author

Avinash Duggempudi
August 20, 2025

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Retail Rev Up

Here's what's happening this week in the world of sales and retail tech:
- Best Buy relaunches a Mirakl-powered marketplace with in-store returns
- AI pilots show quick wins with a 90-day playbook
- Omnichannel POS fuels 484% revenue surge for a retailer
- Retail platform spend set to accelerate through 2030

⏱️THE MINUTE READ

Your forecast isn’t slipping because of effort. It’s slipping because the system you trust is built on guesswork.

  • CRM dashboards reflect rep optimism, not buyer reality.

  • Point tools only surface fragments of truth

  • Leaders react late, chasing updates instead of driving deals.

Real visibility means one system where strategy, buyer signals, and rep execution connect in real time. That’s how CROs cut surprises, coach with confidence, and know which deals are worth their time today.

📌WEEKLY MUST-KNOWS

Best Buy launched a third-party marketplace that more than doubles its online assortment, adds new categories like furniture and instruments, and enables in-store returns. It integrates associates into marketplace cart-building and brings licensed sports merchandise via Fanatics, signaling a broader move beyond core electronics amid pressured guidance. Sellers, brands, and competitors in general merchandise are directly affected as Best Buy leverages Mirakl to scale selection and service.

A practical 90-day AI pilot playbook recommends focusing on high-ROI use cases like dynamic pricing, returns, or top SKUs, anchored by data hygiene and staff upskilling. Reported outcomes include 5–15% revenue lift, 47% fewer stockouts, and 2.3x sales with 2.5x profit for early adopters. Revenue leaders weighing AI spend can sequence pilots to measurable outcomes before scaling.

MarketsandMarkets projects the retail platform market will grow from $39.2 billion in 2025 to $95.5 billion by 2030 at a 19.5% CAGR. Growth is fueled by omnichannel adoption, AI personalization, retail media and composable architectures. For commercial leaders, this underscores budget shifts toward unified data, modular POS and customer engagement stacks that drive speed and margin.

⚡QUICK READS

11 Best Ecommerce Platforms For Your Business In 2025: A comparison of leading ecommerce platforms underscores the strategic tradeoffs around native payments, AI-assisted workflows, and extensibility for scaling merchants.(More)

Best Buy Launches 3P Seller Marketplace Offering Tech, Musical Instruments, Sports Collectibles, Toys: Best Buy’s Mirakl-powered marketplace adds new categories and allows in-store returns, addressing past customer friction and creating new attach opportunities for store associates.(More)

🧠LEADING VOICES

I’m A First-Time CEO - No MBA, No Business School Stamp

Just 20 years in sales carrying a number, grinding in the trenches, scaling teams, making mistakes, fixing them and doing it all over again. Now I’m in the thick of scaling an AI-native company. It’s messy, humbling, and the steepest learning curve of my life.

Here are 7 lessons I’ve learned the hard way:
1️⃣ Constrain your resources → When you don’t have endless budget you find out what really matters. Scarcity is clarity.
2️⃣ Frameworks or foundations over vibes → SPICED, Bow Tie, Rev Architecture… they stop the team from running 20 different playbooks at once.
3️⃣ AI ≠ assistant → It’s not about writing emails faster. The game changes when you rebuild the system around it.
4️⃣ Trust + dashboards → Data is useless if your reps don’t believe in the process. Change management is the hardest (and most important) job
5️⃣ Always talk to customers → The best roadmap decisions don’t come from Notion docs they come from raw customer calls - if you're not speaking to a customer AT LEAST weekly re think what you're doing and where you're focusing your time
6️⃣ Pivot AND iterate fast - most of the time if you think you need to change you're deciding too late - focus on the metrics that matter, run experiments, get in front of customers and create the feedback loops to iterate. But when it's really not getting traction PIVOT hard, be brave 7️⃣ Play the long game → Forget vanity metrics. If your North Star is daily active usage, keep your eyes there.

I loved listening to Justin Fitzpatrick with Tom Glason on Making the Grade podcast (above) - Building for a Smart Exit talk to some of these points - definitely worth a listen..

Sales Intelligence is a ClickZ Media publication in the Sales & Marketing division