Short version
I'm Ivo Oppong-Addai, founder and CEO of Next Commerce GmbH (founded 2020, based in Weikersheim, Germany). 10+ years in e-commerce and digital marketing, one prior venture in the same field, and the Direct-to-Dealer model emerged for me from a concrete challenge I encountered at Bosch Power Tools: brand manufacturers with established dealer networks who want end-customer proximity without dismantling the distribution they depend on.
Background
My career in digital sales started more than a decade ago. Across e-commerce and digital marketing I've worked through the full range: D2C shops, marketplace strategies, classical indirect distribution, performance marketing, attribution, conversion optimisation. What surfaced again and again across every stop was the same pattern. Manufacturers with established dealer relationships kept facing the same trilemma. They wanted end-customer proximity but feared channel conflict. They wanted data but had no levers to capture it. They wanted to sell directly without abandoning their dealer network.
Before founding Next Commerce, I built another company in the same problem space. That experience was formative: it showed me where the established solutions structurally fail and where the genuinely hard problems sit. Without those earlier years, Next Commerce would not exist.
How Direct-to-Dealer emerged
The decisive moment came in a project at Bosch Power Tools. Bosch is the archetypal DACH brand manufacturer: powerful brand, established dealer network, thousands of specialist dealers worldwide, end customers who want to buy the product through the dealer channel. And simultaneously: a digital marketing engine that generated millions of impressions every day, none of which could be reliably attributed to a measurable sale.
None of the existing solutions fit. A D2C shop would have antagonised the dealer network. A dealer-locator map gave no attribution. Drop-shipment loaded the risk back onto the brand. Marketplace sales sacrificed margins and brand control.
From that specific gap the Direct-to-Dealer model emerged: the customer buys on the brand domain, the dealer fulfills, the manufacturer keeps data sovereignty and marketing attribution, the dealer gets pre-paid orders without acquisition cost. Nobody loses.
What started as a prototype at Bosch became the platform Next Commerce is today. The Dealer Checkout is the production-ready implementation of the model I developed over the early years together with practice partners from the DACH mid-market.
What I write about
On the Next Commerce resources section I write about the topics brand manufacturers with dealer networks structurally have to deal with. Three focus areas:
Strategy: Brand Commerce as a discipline, the four models (D2C, D2D, Marketplace, classical), channel conflict, mid-market strategy. I try to sort the field clearly and provide decision frameworks that work in practice.
Data and Attribution: Sell-in vs sell-out, marketing attribution for brand manufacturers, customer data in indirect distribution. Topics that have been discussed for years in theory but only become genuinely addressable through the D2D model.
Operations and Implementation: What manufacturers experience operationally when they shift to D2D. What dealers experience when they receive pre-paid orders from brand-manufacturer traffic. What concretely changes in onboarding speed, marketing efficiency, and revenue trajectory.
What you can talk to me about
I take time for conversations with brand manufacturers and specialist dealers who are seriously considering the D2D model or want to optimise an existing setup. Typical reasons to talk: you have a D2C shop and you're seeing friction in your dealer network. You have a classical store locator that produces no measurable sales. You want to build customer lifetime value inside an indirect distribution model.
The fastest way to reach me is via LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/iaddai) or via the contact form. If you want a 15-minute live demo of the Dealer Checkout, the product page is the shortest path.