Chris Daly, Founder, I Want That! | 25 years in retail, 40+ ecommerce brands
Negotiated Commerce Creates Customer Loyalty
The Rialto Market in Venice has been in the same location since 1097. It was renovated in 1907. It has survived plagues, wars, the collapse of empires, and the rise of Amazon. It is still open. The merchants there still negotiate. They always have. Fixed pricing, the model most DTC brands treat as sacred, is not how commerce works. It is how one country decided commerce should work, for a few decades, in a world that no longer exists. The take-it-or-leave-it price tag is not a business model. It is an ideology. And ideologies do not scale.
Negotiated Commerce is Thousands of Years Old
Walk through any market in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, or Southern Europe and the transaction looks the same: a buyer expresses interest, a seller names a price, and a conversation begins. Not an argument. A conversation. Both parties have something the other wants. The price is where they meet.
This is not primitive. This is not unsophisticated. This is how commerce worked for the first 1000 years of recorded mercantile history, and still works for the majority of the world's population today.
The fixed-price model arrived in America primarily through department stores in the late 19th century. It was an operational convenience, not a philosophical truth. John Wanamaker didn't invent fixed pricing because it was better for customers. He invented it because he had too many salespeople and couldn't trust them all to negotiate consistently. The price tag was a management tool. Somewhere along the way, DTC culture turned a staffing solution into a brand identity.
I spent 25 years working with retailers across channels. The brands that were most rigid about pricing, the ones who treated a customer's desire to negotiate as a personal insult, were also the ones most exposed when acquisition costs spiked. They had no flexibility in the relationship. When the customer stopped paying the asking price, there was nowhere to go. The brand didn't have a negotiation layer. It had a wall.
Negotiated Commerce is Constrained on Platforms
Global ecommerce crossed $6 trillion in 2024. The majority of that volume, across Asia, the Middle East, and emerging markets, was not transacted at fixed prices. Platforms like Taobao, Meesho, and regional WhatsApp commerce networks are built on offer and counter-offer as a core mechanic. The fixed-price western DTC model is the minority position in global digital commerce, not the standard.
Closer to home: eBay processed over $73 billion in gross merchandise value in 2024, a meaningful portion of it through Best Offer. Poshmark, Mercari, Facebook Marketplace. Every resale platform that achieved scale did it by building negotiation into the transaction flow. The consumer has been telling the market what it wants for twenty years. Most DTC brands have not been listening.
Negotiated Commerce is the Norm. Take it or Leave it is the Exception.
The DTC world has a category of founder who is genuinely offended by a customer who wants to negotiate. The customer has looked at the product, considered the price, and decided the gap between what they want to pay and what's being asked is worth a conversation. To the fixed-price founder, this is disrespectful. The brand has spoken. Why is the customer questioning it?
Here is the honest answer: because buyers have always questioned prices. That is not a character flaw. That is commerce.
The Rialto merchant who has been selling produce in the same market square for three generations did not build longevity by refusing to negotiate. He built it by understanding that the goal is a transaction that leaves both parties willing to return. The buyer gets something close to what they wanted to pay. The seller moves inventory, captures revenue, and creates a customer who comes back. Nobody leaves angry. The market stays full.
The DTC brand that would rather lose the sale than negotiate does not lose just one sale. It loses the customer, the referral, the second purchase, and the lifetime value, all to protect a price point that was, in most cases, set with enough margin to have had the conversation in the first place.
Negotiated commerce is not a discount strategy. A discount is what you offer when you've given up. Negotiation is what you do when you still have leverage. The customer who makes an offer is a customer who wants to buy. They have already done the hard part. They've found your product, evaluated it, and decided it's worth their time to engage. The only question is whether you'll meet them.
The Rialto has been answering yes for 900 years. The brands that answer yes, that build a layer into their commerce that allows the conversation to happen, are not cheapening their brand. They are behaving like every durable merchant in recorded history. They are returning to the original commerce.
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The Monday Morning Market
The Rialto opens at 6AM on Monday. The boats come in off the sea with whatever the sea offered that week. The fish merchant doesn't control the assortment. He works with what arrived. He prices the morning's catch against what he paid for it, what his neighbors are charging, and who is standing in front of him.
That last variable is the one most DTC brands have never built for.
The Venetian resident, the neighbor who has bought fish from the same family for twenty years, knows to negotiate. She knows the margins, the seasonal rhythms, the difference between a slow Tuesday and a packed Saturday in July. She gets a price that reflects the relationship. The tourist who wandered in from the vaporetto stop does not know to ask. He pays the ask. Both transactions close. Neither customer leaves feeling cheated.
Ten million tourists visit Venice every year. The Rialto merchants have built a business that serves both populations simultaneously, the high-frequency loyal buyer who negotiates on relationship, and the low-frequency visitor who pays on impulse. The margin architecture handles both. The conversation handles both.
Now map that to your Shopify store.
Your loyal buyers, the customers in your top quintile who have purchased three, four, five times, are the residents. They know your product. They know your cadence. They have a price relationship with your brand that is different from the tourist who found you through a Meta ad last Thursday. A blanket fixed price treats them identically. That is not a service model. That is an operational shortcut.
The fish merchant's inventory turns daily. The bread is baked fresh and gone by noon. The flower merchant adjusts for what bloomed this week, not what the catalog said last season. Every one of them is running an inventory planning cycle that would be familiar to any Shopify operator managing SKU velocity and markdown timing, except the Rialto merchant has been doing it for generations, in the same square, with the same neighbors, building lifetime values that compound across centuries.
The question is not whether your Shopify store can negotiate. It already does, through coupons, abandoned cart emails, and flash sales. The question is whether you are doing it deliberately, with margin floors and customer context, or accidentally, with blanket discounts that train every customer to wait.
The Rialto merchant does not wait for inventory to rot before he moves it. He prices the morning catch against the morning demand, closes the transaction at a margin that works, and opens tomorrow with a clean slate. That is inventory management. That is customer service. That is negotiated commerce.
What This Means for You
- Audit where you are losing customers who wanted to buy. Cart abandonment is not always price sensitivity. Sometimes it is a customer waiting for an invitation to negotiate. If you have no mechanism for that conversation, you are not losing to a competitor. You are losing to silence.
- Separate negotiation from discounting in your mental model. A blanket 20% off coupon is a discount. A customer-generated offer at 12% off on a product with a 60% margin is a negotiation and it closes at a better margin than the coupon. The mechanics are different. The outcome is different. Treat them differently.
- Build the layer before you need it. The brands adding negotiation to their stack during a CAC crisis are doing it defensively. The brands that build it now, when they have time to set rules, test acceptance rates, and understand their margin floors, are doing it as a growth strategy. There is a meaningful difference between the two.
Vector Enables Your Shop to Become the Rialto Market
Vector adds a negotiation layer to your Shopify store by letting customers submit offers, setting your floor, and closing the gap between what they want to pay and what you need to make. It is not a markdown tool. It is the digital equivalent of the conversation that's been happening in every durable market since the Rialto opened its doors in 1097.
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