Nike to Once Again Sell on Amazon

After a six-year absence, Nike will soon begin selling products directly on Amazon.com, having previously stopped in 2019 to go it alone. At the same time, the company is reportedly set to increase prices across most of its sneakers and other clothes in the wake of recent U.S. tariffs. Nike stopped selling through Amazon after just two years on the platform, in part because of Amazon’s inability to crack down on counterfeiters and unlicensed sellers. Just as pivotal was its desire to build its own direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales platforms in the Nike app and website, which saw it reduce its other retail partners around the same time. Nike goods have continued to appear on Amazon in the years since, but only sold by third-party sellers on the platform.

Total Retail's Take: This reversal in strategy from Nike signals the brand's struggles in recent years in the DTC arena. Under its new CEO, Elliott Hill, Nike has sought to re-establish its wholesale business, which will now once again include Amazon. The incomparable traffic levels available to brands selling on Amazon are hard to turn away from, even with the tradeoff of losing some brand control and customer data. Nike, like many other retailers and brands that import large quantities of product from China, are seeking ways to offset cost increases from tariffs. Driving top-line revenue gains by selling its goods on Amazon coupled with increased prices for those products are two of the ways that Nike is planning to forge ahead in this uncertain macroeconomic environment.