Best Buy has launched a new online marketplace, which allows third-party vendors to sell electronics and other items to customers browsing the retailer’s website.

Best Buy is just the latest company to adopt the marketplace-as-a-service strategy. Amazon has a third-party marketplace, as does Walmart, Lowe’s, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, Macy’s, and Target. (Just to name a few.)

So if anything, Best Buy is late to the party with this launch. But it’s still an appealing move for a retailer that wants to seem like it offers anything you could ever need, according to Anthony Chukumba, a consumer sector analyst at Loop Capital Markets.

“It gives Best Buy much more of an endless aisle as compared to all the products they currently stock and sell themselves,” he said.

The best part of that endless aisle is that it doesn’t require an endless warehouse.

“Usually, Best Buy will not stock the product because they just don’t think it’s going to sell frequently enough to justify having it in their assortment,” Chukumba said.

And since retailers like Best Buy already have websites to sell their own stuff, it doesn’t take much investment to open the gates to other sellers. It’s kinda like free money, said Michael Baker, a senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson.

“Those third-party marketplaces have very strong margins, because you’re basically just taking a royalty,” he said.

But one risk of turning yourself into a marketplace is that you could be giving your competitors a boost, per Neil Saunders, a retail analyst at GlobalData.

“ If there is overlap with the core categories Best Buy sells, there can be cannibalization,” he said. “People could buy a marketplace product rather than a Best Buy product, and that can be problematic.”

But Saunders said the bigger risk is reputational. If a customer buys a TV from a third party, and that TV arrives two weeks late or in two pieces, ”guess who the customer blames? It’s Best Buy, because that’s the name that’s on the header of the website.  And even though they might be dealing with a third party, the customer still sees this as a Best Buy problem.”

There are ways retailers can manage this reputational risk, according to Toni Moreno, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. For one, they can vet anyone who wants to sell through their site.

“There are marketplaces that are more open, like Amazon, for example — many vendors can list on Amazon. But companies like Best Buy can be selective  about which vendors they want to bring to the platform,” he said.

And once they have vendors on board, retailers can sell them other services, like advertising and logistics.

“Walmart is now doing a lot of advertising and a lot of fulfillment,” said Moreno. “So part of the money that they make on the marketplace is from selling services to vendors that use Walmart's infrastructure.”

Moreno said when you step back and blur your eyes a little, a lot of these retailers are starting to look like tech companies.