The Distribution Market Has Changed: Adapt or Get Left Behind

If you're a regional distributor, you're feeling the pressure.

Somewhere in the past two years, one of your competitors got acquired. Maybe two.

A national player moved into your territory, or a big box retailer started courting the retail customers you've had for decades.

Here's how smart regional distributors are thriving in an ecommerce world.

The brands you serve are selling directly to consumers more through ecommerce and less through traditional retail stores - which are your customers. And the trickle-down effect is hitting your bottom line.

Regional distributors are facing a choice they've never had to make before: adapt to a market that's changing fast or watch the brands they distribute - and their business - move on without them.

The Squeeze Is Real

The market has moved. National players bought up the independents. Home Depot bought a distributor. Lowe's and Walmart are moving in the same direction. But these are just new spins on traditional distribution strategies; the real news was happening online.

Amazon made pricing transparent and fast shipping universal. The people who buy from your customers' retail businesses are getting younger every year; and younger buyers search, compare, and click. So even the most traditional brands are setting aside their fears of channel conflict and starting to sell online.

But brands are finding Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces extract a toll beyond hefty seller fees; the marketplaces own the customer. And customer connections are the foundation of any brand.

So brands - tired of paying Amazon's toll and losing the customer relationship - started embracing direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce. And every sale sold directly to the consumer online is one less sale made by your retail accounts - and a direct hit to your bottom line.

The Real Problem Is Not the One Everyone Names

The easy story is that regional distributors are getting squeezed on price and speed. That might be true, but it's not the deepest problem.

The deeper problem is relevance.

Regional distributors already have the inventory, people, and workflows in place to fulfill brand ecommerce orders.

The value regional distributors have always provided - proximity, relationships, local knowledge, trusted service - has become harder for brands to see in a world dominated by ecommerce.

That's a hard thing to fix when your core business runs on local relationships and your technology was built for a different era.

Here's Where the Story Gets Interesting

Most of what's written about regional distribution focuses on what distributors are losing. Not enough of it focuses on what they still have.

Think about what a brand actually needs to run a competitive D2C operation. Inventory in multiple locations, close to customers. Warehouse staff who know how to pick, pack, and ship. Carrier relationships. Operational infrastructure that already works.

Building all that from scratch costs millions and takes years. Contracting it to a national 3PL means finding the right fit and hoping they treat your product like it matters. Handing it to Amazon means giving up the customer relationship - the data, the loyalty, the repeat purchase - in exchange for reach.

None of those are good answers. They're just the answers that were available at the time.

The Asset Nobody's Connecting

But now brands with established regional distributor relationships have something most people overlook: that infrastructure already exists. Their distributors have already solved the proximity problem. The inventory is in the right locations. The trust was built over years of showing up, solving problems, and helping the brand grow its business.

The problem was never that the assets weren't there. The problem is that they've been disconnected. A warehouse in the Midwest. Inventory in the Southeast. A distributor in the Pacific Northwest. All of them stocked with inventory. None of them capable of working together to fill a brand's online orders.

What Changes When You Connect It

The Distribution Network (TDN) was built to make that connection. TDN enables brands and their regional distributors to work together as a national ecommerce fulfillment network - using the inventory and operations already in place, without replacing current systems or rebuilding from scratch.

For distributors, ecommerce orders flow into existing warehouse operations via the TDN platform, which handles order routing, shipping rate comparison, carrier selection, and label printing. No ripping out the current ERP. No months of retraining. Just a technology layer that sits on top of what's already there and makes it work for ecommerce. The revenue is new. The disruption is minimal.

For brands, it means national fulfillment coverage through partners who already know the product, already stock it, and already have a relationship worth protecting - without handing Amazon the customer data or starting over with a 3PL that doesn't know their business.

The technology powering it - built by Etail Solutions' 15+ years of solving real-world, multi-location ecommerce problems - handles the integration work that makes this genuinely hard: connecting sales channels, inventory systems, and shipping platforms across different data formats so everything talks to everything, regardless of what systems each partner is already running.

Infrastructure Doesn't Get Replaced on a Whim

The distributors that plug in don't just get new revenue. They become essential to their brands' ecommerce strategy. When you're part of how a brand reaches its customers directly, you're not just a vendor anymore. You're infrastructure. And infrastructure gets protected.

The brands that bring distributors into their D2C strategy - instead of routing around them - end up with something genuinely difficult to replicate: a national fulfillment network built on real relationships and real inventory, with none of the platform dependency that comes with handing everything to a 3PL or other fulfillment partner that doesn't share your interests.

The conventional wisdom says the regional distributor is losing ground. Maybe. But the conventional wisdom has been wrong before.

The assets are there. The relationships are there. The inventory is already sitting in the right locations. The next step is yours.