Not too long ago many businesses such as a Best Buy or Walmart would only sell their own products on their site. Nowadays, a lot of them have adopted Amazon’s strategy of simply allow individuals and companies to sell their products with them. This is great for small businesses as you can get the traffic and attention to sell your items when normally one would be fighting against the bigger companies for that consumer attention.
In some cases what I noticed is that companies appear to be listing tons of products that are constantly not in stock on these company sites but they are on their own sites. The answer seemed pretty straight forward as they are hoping when people search for various products on the larger sites they will now become brand aware of the company’s offerings where in turn they are likely to search for the company directly. If they make a sale that way they essentially got free advertising while not having to pay a percentage of the sale to the big box store.
Kind of sneaky in many ways I guess you can say. But at the same time I guess a small business needs all the help they can get.