While Amazon and Walmart have (so far) been cold-shouldered by luxury brands, eBay will soon be stocking its digital shelves with a litany of high-end labels, thanks to a new partnership with the shopping app Spring.
As reported by Racked and CNBC, Spring, which “works directly with more than 1,500 brands, including Prada, Chloe, and Saint Laurent,” will have a digital storefront on eBay’s site that “function[s] like a boutique… where shoppers should be pleased to find more of their favorite brands in one place.”
The boutique set-up will also provide something of a branding buffer between eBay and the luxury labels that have gone to such great lengths to avoid gigantic online marketplaces. “That eBay isn’t just partnering directly with the luxury brands Spring carries might speak to how hard it is to broker these relationships,” Racked notes.
So, the deal could be a big win for eBay, in that it will (basically) get to stock brands that have treated Amazon and Walmart like plague-ridden bazaars. And, it could also be a big win for Spring, if it hopes to be a competing player in the luxury e-comm space: its projected $100 million in sales this year is a tiny fraction of what established retailers like Nordstrom ($14.4 billion last year) and Yoox Net-a-Porter ($600 million) are currently pulling in.
