Mirakl Americas CEO Scott Eckert on Marketplace Growth and Retail Acceleration | Mirakl Summit 2025

Welcome back, everyone.

We are here with our final interview from the Miracle Summit.

This is Omni Talk Retail.

I'm Ann Mazinga.

I'm Chris Walton.

And standing here beside us, we have probably the guest of the moment.

I mean, the most.

One of the most important people at this summit.

We have Scott Ecker, the CEO of the Americas for Miracle.

Scott, thank you for taking the time to hang out with us on TikTok.

No, I am happy to see you guys.

Thank you for the opportunity.

I'm not sure about guest of the moment, but I'll try to live up to that.

I think that you should own that.

All right, I will own that.

Thank you.

Well, it's our job to make you appear that way to our listeners.

But.

But, you know, we were joking.

Before we got started, we said this.

You're like almost 100 days on the job, you know, three months in.

What led you to want to take this role as the CEO of America at Miracles?

And what's your background, too?

So I joined Miracle after five years at Walmart and I was doing tech innovation at Walmart.

Before that, I was a serial entrepreneur.

I built and sold a couple of companies.

Not in retail, it was robotics, enterprise, mobile devices.

But way back in the late 90s, I was an early E commerce pioneer.

So back at dell, I created Dell.com and it was at the time the world's largest E commerce business.

And so I have a love for E commerce, but I'm a builder at heart.

And the opportunity at Miracle was to start with this amazing platform.

Miracle's got this tremendous tech platform.

It's a tremendous group of customers, and to build a much bigger business in the US on that platform.

That's what excited me.

Got it.

Well, I'm curious, what component of Miracle, what capability or initiative are you most excited about and why?

So I love all of our children equally.

Just to be clear, right.

There are two things that I'm quite excited about.

One is what we're doing what we call Miracle Connect, which is the technology we're providing for sellers to allow sellers to connect to multiple marketplaces, Miracle and others, and build a full cockpit for sellers to manage their business.

That's a big growth opportunity for us in the US and globally.

Actually, the other thing I'm really interested in is our B2B approach.

So taking the Miracle technology and providing it into customers that are not retailers.

They might be parts distribution companies, they might be group purchasing organizations, it might be wholesalers, but there's a big market opportunity of B2B customers that we can talk to.

And we had Max Tepper from the SAC who's part of the Miracle Connect program on earlier today.

And for those that haven't had a chance to watch that, you should.

He explains it in great detail.

All right, so if you go beyond the traditional marketplace platform though Scott, which I think most of our audience is pretty familiar with, there are other things that you can do to drive revenue.

How do you think about that?

Well, one of the things we're really focused on here at this, at the show and we've been talking about quite a bit is the opportunity for retail media.

Right.

The retail media.

Bringing marketplaces into retail media networks we think is a big opportunity for us and it's relatively new and obviously retail media has become a big part of major retailers business.

We think it become a big part of a broader set of customers businesses.

So we're quite excited about that.

And how do you see that kind of evolving Scott, over the, the retail media component over the next, you know, even couple of years here?

Well, well the sort of the long tail of third party sellers into retail really haven't had an opportunity for retail media for, for them to manage ad spend on big retail networks.

So.

Right.

Bringing them into the marketplace is a, is a great opportunity and I think that's going to create a richer set of inventory of properties and advertising for that set of customers.

What's also happening, I don't know what the answer is going to be is the impact of AI on search and that's going to change how retail media is spent and we are learning along with our customers what that impact is going to be.

But it's going to be significant.

Yeah, yeah.

To that first point, I mean we saw on stage today at the summit like the opportunity that companies like Lowe's and Best Buy have in terms of standing up retail media as really an untapped opportunity to this point for those companies to get the revenue increases that they'd be looking for from, from that type of work.

Right.

And even some of our, our large retailers that have established retail media networks, they have not brought on board the long tail of third party.

For third party sellers, one plus one equals three again.

So let me put you on the spot a little bit here Scott.

So how do you believe the market is big enough to succeed in the Americas?

Like does everyone need a marketplace?

I think you probably know that it's the second largest E commerce market in the world.

Just let me make sure.

In case you didn't.

I did.

So the so the short answer is.

Yeah, let me answer it in a more intelligent way.

But the retailers are different, right, too.

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.

But we, we've got some of the most iconic retailers in the world in this market.

In fact, some, many of them are in the room here.

We've got a dynamic set of brands and sellers in this market.

Many of them are also in the room here.

We think there's a really significant opportunity for more and more marketplaces.

If you step back and think about not the endless aisle, but curated specialty marketplaces.

And many of our customers are doing exactly that, where customers come to them for there's a reason they've got a brand reason that their customers come to them.

There's an opportunity to build on that with a marketplace.

And most of our customers are curated specialty marketplaces and there's lots of room for more of those.

And it was kind of a funny question too because like, at the end of the day, that type of methodology is applicable to almost everyone, right?

It's, yes, pretty broadly.

I mean, it's.

At some point smaller companies may not.

Be equipped to do it.

But, but, but yes, it's particularly those that are already E commerce forward in their thinking and have built a, you know, a D2C E commerce business, have a great reason that customers come to them.

So there's a, there's a brand resonance.

Those are the ones that can build upon and build a marketplace.

Well, Scott, as we close this out, what, what do you think?

You know, this theme of acceleration or accelerate being the key kind of theme for the miracle Summit this week.

What do you think are some of the most significant ways that retailers are going to accelerate their growth in the coming year?

So, well, first, marketplaces.

The marketplace business is actually growing faster than traditional E commerce.

Right.

I mean, our own business is growing 30% year on year in terms of turns, terms of the GMV that our customers put through our pipes.

So that's pretty significant growth.

We've actually been focused here at the conference.

Obviously I mentioned retail media, but actually some of the basics, the good execution of a marketplace, expanding number of sellers, expanding the number of products, experimenting with 1P versus 3Pmarketplace versus dropship.

And so we're doing a lot of talking about if you want to accelerate, sign up more sellers, get more products on your site, embrace a dynamic supply chain model in this world of retail uncertainty and that will be an unlock for their business.

Right.

So basically it's two pronged, right?

You get the marketplace platform growth and then you get the retail media layer on top of it.

For many of the retailers that want.

To do that with a third prong of the sellers as we sign them up on our connect product was as they grow with more and more and more marketplaces.

Yeah, right, right.

Yeah.

Then there's that angle to it, too.

Awesome.

All right, man.

Well, thanks for joining us.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

Yeah, Scott, thank you, guys.

I appreciate the time.

Yeah, thanks for coming.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, no, thanks for having us.

And again, we're going to be here all day recording interviews, so until next.

Time, and be careful out there.