Selling direct-to-consumer can be incredibly powerful. I’ve come to believe, though, that businesses can realize most of the benefits of DTC if a significant enough sample of sales is direct–it doesn’t have to be the entire business.

First, DTC of course gives brands access to a treasure trove of first-party data on their customers. While I think the value of data like this is frankly overrated, it does have practical importance. First, it’s much easier to remarket someone when you have their email address, so DTC in theory should have higher reorder rates than other channels. Second, having the ability to survey or talk to individual customers allows businesses to get direct feedback. But even if a business is omnichannel, you just need a sizable enough DTC channel to find enough customers to survey.

Second, one of the main advantages of DTC is it allows for cheap and rapid testing of nearly anything about a business.

Want to see if consumers are interested in a particular product? You don’t even need to manufacture it. Design a website, create a few product renders, and spin up some ads. You can easily see what the cost of getting someone to sign up for your wait list is. And while I don’t recommend this, you can put items on pre-order and see what the actual cost per acquisition for the product would be. Properly estimate your product cost of goods and–voila–you have an early read on whether the product will sell profitably. You can do all of this in a few days and for a couple thousand dollars at most. It’s nearly impossible to do something like that in retail or on Amazon.

The testing doesn’t stop there. For marketing, DTC allows you to experiment with creative and copy permutations, product pricing, bundling, and promotional strategies. You can even test the product itself. Native Deodorant was well-known for constantly A/B testing its product formulations and seeing which variants had higher satisfaction rates, return rates, and retention. A winner variant would then be competed against a challenger, ad infinitum. Notice, however, that a business doesn’t have to be 100% DTC to run these tests. The DTC channel just needs to be big enough to get significant results and then marketing and product learnings can then be broadly applied to every channel.

Finally, if you build an operating DTC channel, it’s much easier to get into other channels like retail. Want to convince Target or Walmart that your brand will sell through their stores? First show there’s demand for your product online and that you have the capital and operational chops to run a business. This will massively de-risk things for the retailer. For example, Harry’s the shaving company started DTC and smartly pivoted to majority retail a few years after launch. Many others have done the same.

DTC is powerful for collecting first-party data, marketing and product testing, and business validation. But a business doesn’t have to be purely DTC to realize these benefits.