Netrush has the sort of origin story ecommerce used to produce before every founder called a warehouse an operating system. In 2006, Brian Gonsalves and Chris Marantette worked from Gonsalves’s living room in Vancouver, Washington, fulfilling internet orders from a small storage unit. The product mix was gloriously uncurated. In 2007, two of the best sellers were the ThighMaster and a folding stepper machine. The company learned retail from the unglamorous end: buy something, list it, ship it, answer the customer, repeat.
That repetition eventually became a business for other companies. Netrush opened a distribution hub in Erlanger, Kentucky, in 2013, close to a major Amazon facility and within fast ground reach of much of the country. The same year, shaker-bottle maker Cyclone Cup became its first brand partner. The proposition was straightforward: let Netrush buy the inventory and handle Amazon. It would manage the catalog, content, advertising, forecasting, fulfillment, customer service, and gray-market headaches that made the marketplace feel less like a storefront than an unusually profitable escape room.
01 / The machine
More than an agency, less tidy than a label
Calling Netrush an Amazon agency misses half the building. The company can act as retailer, marketplace operator, third-party logistics provider, creative studio, media buyer, catalog mechanic, brand-protection desk, consultant, and software layer. It runs two core arrangements. Under Standard Retail, Netrush buys the products and pays for fulfillment. Under Managed Retail, the brand keeps its products and seller account while Netrush runs the playbook. Pricing is custom in both cases.
Who owns the Amazon transaction?
Around those models sits the stack. Netrush offers fulfillment and transportation, demand planning, catalog management, listing photography and video, Amazon Stores, paid search and DSP advertising, unauthorized-seller monitoring, consulting, and a reporting portal. Its Netrush 360 intelligence engine tracks retail performance, marketplace health, marketing efficiency, inventory health, and customer lifetime value. In 2021, it acquired Sellozo, software that automates and optimizes Amazon pay-per-click advertising across global markets.
The acquisition made strategic sense because an ad bid is never only an ad bid. It is also a margin decision, an inventory decision, and sometimes a warehouse problem arriving early. If a campaign accelerates a product that will stock out next Tuesday, the dashboard looks heroic right until the listing goes dark. Netrush’s differentiation is the promise that the people moving the ad dial can see the inventory gauge, the content problem, and the shipping bill.
“What is it in service of?”Chris Marantette, co-founder, on choosing growth levers
02 / The reversal
The middleman discovers ownership
The most interesting thing about Netrush is that it now questions the model that helped build it. Gonsalves recently described the old arrangement without perfume: Netrush bought inventory, managed everything, and benefited most. His newer argument is that brands should own the Amazon transaction and build a more direct connection with the customer. His phrase is “unwholesale Amazon.” Netrush becomes the guide and infrastructure, not necessarily the merchant of record.
What changed its mind? Amazon matured. Easy marketplace margin became tighter margin. Fees multiplied, advertising became less optional, logistics grew more technical, and basic seller tools became accessible enough that a brand no longer needed a giant internal team to own its account. The customer also stopped behaving by channel. A shopper might research on a brand site, compare on Amazon, expect Prime delivery, and reorder through a subscription. Optimizing one box in that journey can damage another.
The old accelerator captured value by owning inventory and execution. The new model tries to create value by coordinating execution while the brand retains the account, transaction, and compounding customer knowledge.
This is not a clean abandonment of wholesale. Standard Retail still exists because ownership, cash flow, category rules, and organizational appetite differ by brand. It is a portfolio of operating models, not a conversion ceremony. The useful part is the question it forces: who owns the transaction, who learns from it, and whose asset becomes more valuable after five years?
03 / The evidence
What failed first was usually control
Netrush’s case studies repeatedly begin before the ad campaign. PEET Dryer had gray-market distribution and pricing-policy violations that began to strain relationships with physical retailers. Netrush says the brand regained control over most of its catalog within six months and later reached 93 percent control across listings. Only then did the work widen: PEET was repositioned from a hunter-focused boot dryer toward a household product for families. The reported results included 53 percent year-over-year top-line growth, 32 percent more new Amazon customers, and 36 percent more direct-site traffic.
Leatherman’s European Amazon operation had the same disease at international scale: more than 300 sellers, inconsistent listings, chaotic prices, and weak localization. Netrush helped cut the seller count to 32, reorganized the catalog, and tailored content for local languages. The company reported monthly sales at 100 times the prior-year level. Nutcase, a helmet brand, offered a smaller catalog lesson: Netrush compressed 150 separate Amazon product identifiers into five coherent listings, then reported an 82 percent sales increase in a month.
Sometimes the first failure was checkout. Visitors used Enzymedica’s website to learn about digestive supplements, then left to buy on Amazon for Prime delivery and returns. Netrush added Buy with Prime to eligible products on the direct site. The published Amazon case study reported a 34 percent increase in orders per visit and an 81 percent rise in new-to-brand customers. The surprising part was not merely conversion. It was that Prime convenience on the brand’s own property attracted people the company had not previously captured.
And sometimes the failure is simply believing that attractive digital real estate attracts visitors. Netrush’s advice on Amazon Stores is pleasingly blunt: without paid promotion, they are difficult to discover. Build the page, then budget to distribute it. A storefront without traffic is a brochure in a locked room.
04 / The bill
Custom pricing, measurable friction
What does the whole machine cost? Netrush does not publish a rate card. It quotes according to the model and service mix, which makes a tidy comparison impossible. Standard Retail economics can include the margin between what Netrush pays a brand and what the marketplace customer pays. Managed Retail can combine service, media, software, creative, and logistics costs. The buyer has to compare that blended number with an internal team plus agencies, warehouses, software subscriptions, carrier contracts, and the cost of their handoffs.
One offer provides a useful clue about how Netrush wants the arithmetic judged. Its strategic transportation analysis examines service levels, shipment weights, zones, surcharges, carrier options, warehousing, and FBA preparation. If the analysis does not identify savings at least twice its cost, the customer pays nothing. The dollar fee is still undisclosed, but the guarantee supplies a testable hurdle rather than a vibe.
05 / The steal
Copy the sequence, not the org chart
A brand does not need to hire Netrush to borrow its best operating ideas. The reusable advantage is not a secret bid formula. It is the sequence in which problems are attacked and the insistence that channel decisions share the same economic picture.
The five-move marketplace cleanup
Map authorized sellers, ownership of listings, pricing-policy violations, account permissions, and catalog duplication before spending harder.
Consolidate variants, correct attributes, localize language, and make imagery answer the questions that produce returns and bad reviews.
Put advertising, margin, stock position, lead time, and fulfillment cost in the same weekly operating review.
An Amazon Store, video, or beautiful listing is an asset, not an audience. Give it a traffic plan and a measurable job.
Let shoppers research, buy, receive, and reorder in the combination they prefer, then measure total customer value across the journey.
Netrush’s own use of generative AI offers another copyable rule. Its Studio team uses the technology for idea generation, review analysis, and faster content planning, but keeps human editors responsible for product nuance, brand voice, and the customer journey. The practical posture is neither panic nor autopilot. Use the machine to widen the draft, then make a person accountable for what becomes true on the product page.
06 / The fit
When the machine is too much machine
Netrush sits between marketplace agencies such as Acadia or Podean, software platforms such as CommerceIQ and Teikametrics, large operators such as Pattern, and a brand’s own ecommerce team. Its integrated pitch is strongest when the underlying business is genuinely integrated: many products, multiple sellers, meaningful ad spend, fragile inventory economics, several channels, and enough order volume for fulfillment choices to matter.
Likely good fit
- Complex or duplicated catalogs
- Rogue sellers and price leakage
- Material Amazon media spend
- Omnichannel fulfillment needs
- Thin internal marketplace bench
Likely poor fit
- Tiny catalog and low volume
- Simple direct-only operation
- Margins too thin for managed layers
- Strong integrated team already in-house
- No budget to distribute creative
There are conditions under which specific tactics weaken, too. In one industry discussion, Netrush said Buy with Prime conversion gains were most likely on sites with at least roughly 50,000 monthly visits; smaller sites may not see the same lift. A brand with weak product-market fit cannot logistics its way to loyalty. A catalog with no differentiation cannot automate itself into a moat. And an all-in-one partner becomes a liability if the brand gives away visibility, account access, or the ability to leave.
That last point makes Netrush’s ownership reversal more than positioning. It is a useful standard for the category. The best operator should leave the brand with cleaner data, stronger accounts, clearer unit economics, and a customer relationship it can still use without the operator. Netrush spent years building the middleman machine. Its sharper opportunity now is to prove that the machine can make the owner more powerful than the middleman.