Reviewed 30 September 2026 · quarterly cycle
Do the marketplace and the agent overlap in what they do?
They overlap in nothing except the address you paste. The marketplace sells, the agent buys on your behalf and moves the goods, and the failure modes belong to different parties.
The evidence
The marketplace controls the listing, the seller behaviour and the domestic dispatch. The agent controls the purchase transaction, the warehouse step and the choice of international line. Where a problem originates in the first set, the agent can raise it but cannot fix it; where it originates in the second, the agent can fix it directly.
That division is why diagnosing a stall starts with identifying which party owns the stage. A domestic dispatch that has not moved is a marketplace-side matter, and the agent can query it but not resolve it. A warehouse measurement that seems wrong is an agent-side matter and is resolved by a re-measure. Sending the second problem to the marketplace wastes a cycle.
The address is the one place the two genuinely meet, because the agent needs a marketplace identifier to act. That is why address hygiene — resolving short links, copying after selecting a variant — has an outsized effect on outcomes. It is the single interface between two systems, and it is the interface most failures cross.
When this does not apply
Where a marketplace operates its own forwarding product, the two roles sit under one operator. In that configuration the division above collapses, and a query goes to one party regardless of which stage stalled. The trade is fewer handoffs against less choice of line.