Jason White: It's actually all about the customer. So it's mapping that customer journey. It's trying to solve the problems that customers want you to solve for them within your ecosystem. Upgrade, downgrade, hide it from your wife or hide it from your husband. Contextual Commerce is going to be the affiliate 3.0 in my view.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, the podcast that Express delivers all you need to
Jason White: know in the fast moving world of E commerce.
[Voiceover]: Every month, Nathan Bush from 12 High End, an E Commerce industry expert, will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers Adding to Cart. Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at E Commerce talent agency E Suite. Today's guest is a retail entrepreneur of the highest extreme and it's really likely that that you've recently used his technology. Jason White is the co founder and managing director of Marketplacer, which in his words, allows you to sell shit that you don't own. In my words, Marketplacer allows retailers to create marketplaces to dramatically expand the product range and serve every need of your customer. That's not even a paid spot. How good was that? Marketplacer currently powers 100 marketplaces in 10 countries across the world and connects about 25,000 businesses for retail trade in Australia. They're currently used by leading retailers including Woolworths, Surf, Stitch, Myer and Petstock and have just secured investment from Woolworths as well as Salesforce. They're currently focused on their US expansion as they aim to take over the retail world. But this isn't his first parade. Jason actually started bike exchange about 15 years ago and it's now a leading online cycling marketplace in 10 countries and valued at $32 million on the ASX. Why he's spending an hour with me I will never know. In today's chat we cover the different type of marketplaces retailers can consider for growth, why marketplaces are a customer strategy, not a product strategy, and why Jason starts his Melbourne mornings off with a surface. So thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Signet, here's our conversation with Jason Wyatt from Marketplacer. Jason, welcome to Add to Cart.
Jason White: Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
[Voiceover]: Thanks for joining us. I hear you. You're in Melbourne, but you started your day off with a surf.
Jason White: Yeah, it is really cool. One of the most amazing experiences that you can nearly do is the Melbourne's not famous for its surf. It's got some of the best Victoria's got some of the best surf in the world, but they've built this place called Urban Surf. It's actually at the airport and it's probably the best way pool in the world at the moment. So every sort of Monday morning at 6am I head to Urban Surf and hit some barrels and some waves before getting in here for an hour. I'm at work by 7:30 and it's just a phenomenon. So yeah, it's just a super way to start the day.
[Voiceover]: That's brilliant because it all came about because you're sitting on your balcony looking super relaxed on a Monday morning and that explains it all.
Jason White: Exactly. You've got to get both sides of it going, actually. You've got to clear the mind, get your body and the blood pumping, but then also have a really great balanced life.
[Voiceover]: Spot on. Now you've had a super crazy last couple of months by the look of it. Some really big investments from the likes of Salesforce and, and Woolworths. How's that been for you?
Jason White: It's been humbling is a word that I typically use when we say it. That and they're two different things. We've probably got three sort of journeys behind capital. We've actually got some of the most amazing institutional funds in Marketplacer who really have enabled us to scale up and grow. And then last year we said, how do we. What purpose can we have behind truly scaling on a global basis and how do we forge a deeper relationship? And then we wanted to do that with a really large ecosystem and we thought, well, Salesforce is one of those organizations and to get a global tech company to buy into a Melbourne technology company really gives us a huge amount of credibility to enable us to grow all over the world. And then the third pillar behind that being Woolworths, to get Australia's largest supermarket or retailer full stop, to not only get over the fact that the build versus buy from a technology perspective, but then to have such a wonderful experience with our team and our product that they said, hey, we believe in this, we believe this can be a phenomenal global technology company. Then to buy in, there's that one word, that humble that rolls through.
[Voiceover]: It's a nice word. It really sums it up nicely from your point of view, a relationship with Woolworths. I'm assuming that it goes beyond the money though, and that there's more of a partnership here. What will it unlock for you moving forward?
Jason White: Primarily it's all around scale and a deep relationship. So there's no caveats that come with either Salesforce Ventures or W23 investing into marketplaces. So there's no preferential or special treatment over any platform or any other customer that necessarily that they'll receive. But what it means is they're invested in our success and that that success now gets extended via a contract. And that success also means that we get a really, really clear look at the rest of the group to enable them to grow in a modern way. And very similar with the Salesforce Ventures deal that we did, there's no preferential treatment in there, but we figured if we could get, if we could get one of the largest technology companies to have a sense of belonging and to be part, deeply invested in our community, then if we're in a deal flow Cycle into their 6,000 customers globally or we're in a hey, how can we work your product over to more integrate deeper into our product? We figured if we can get them to have that sense of belonging behind us as well, that it could be only a positive thing. Brilliant.
[Voiceover]: And so let's, let's take people back if they haven't listened to the Justin Hillberg from Surf Stitch episode with us or they don't know a lot about Marketplacer. And there's a lot more to your story obviously than Marketplacer, but that's where we're going to start. How would you describe Marketplacer?
Jason White: The simplest way to describe Marketplacer is we make it easy to sell shit that you don't own. And what I mean by that is a traditional business has, and we saw it during COVID a traditional business has traditional constraints. And by saying that I want to make it easy to sell shit that you don't own means that you can be limitless around how many widgets you can sell to your customer base. So I'll give you the prime example of what we fundamentally do. So we're a technology company that enables you to create a marketplace to enable to sell things that you don't own. So then if you unpick that, lots of people say to us, well, how many marketplaces can there be? So everyone we speak to, we always talk about two core things in business. What's your unfair advantage? And most businesses, when you really, really dumb it down, is their most important asset that they've got is their customers. So if you've got a large cohort of customers or you know how to attract a large cohort of customers, then if you can make it easy to sell them things on a scalable basis, then you might not call yourself a marketplace. You may call it range extension. You may call it drop shipping, you may call it whatever you like. But if you can pull that together in a really cohesive experience, then you can employ a marketplace strategy. And now we power 100 marketplaces in 10 countries around the world with 25,000 businesses connected into the ecosystem. So, and our community only the more people we get, the more customers we get, the stronger our community gets together. And that's really something we're deeply trying to achieve.
[Voiceover]: Think Shopify plus is just for simple retailers? Well, let me tell you, JB hi Fi is no simple business. But when their old site crashed for two hours during Black Friday, doing nothing was simply not an option. Shopify plus was selected as their e commerce partner to help facilitate the fast growing $5 billion retailer. However, with over 200 dispatch locations, a reliance on a web of APIs, and the ability to handle triple growth, it wasn't an out of the box implementation. But the results spoke for themselves. JB hi Fi cruised through a record Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2019 without a hitch, have reduced average page load time by 15% and were even able to redeploy three techies whose job it was just to watch the servers to make sure it didn't go down. JB hi Fi and Shopify plus not just smashing prices, but smashing e commerce. To read more of JB hi Fi story and see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com au/. What are some of the marketplaces that people may have used, especially here in Australia, that they may not realize is actually powered by Marketplacer?
Jason White: Yeah, there's really three types of marketplaces and I'll touch on all three types and these are both B2 to C and B2B. And what you're finding is B2B is becoming a bit of a revelation. So the first types are your traditional types of marketplaces where, where they don't own any inventory at all. Historically and Australia's been really famous at creating these businesses. They never used to be called marketplaces, they were called classified sites before you could transact on them. They, you know, they were led by great innovators of the Bassetts in seek and you know, Greg Roebuck in car sales and all these incredible Australian. And it's about creating a tribe, a community, a sense of belonging behind two sides of that marketplace. So a cohort of sellers and a community of people who want to buy from them. And sometimes the sellers and the buyers can switch roles and your sellers become buyers and your buyers become sellers. But they're your tribes. So we call them the Tribe Marketplace. So we were famous for creating bike Exchange originally, which we'll probably touch on a maybe a little bit later. But now we power all types of tribal marketplaces all over the world. For example, fish spraying, the largest fishing app is powered by Marketplacer. To create its marketplace, you would have seen during COVID or you may have seen during COVID that a friend of mine, Shane Delia, he approached us and said, hey Jason, I've got a major problem, right? I've got three institutional restaurants, I've got 110 staff who work with them being Maha and the Maha Group. And I can't sell my customers anything. But I've got this glimmer of hope. You know, I've figured out how to deliver food to customers within a 35k of 35k radius of the Melbourne CBD. And I've got this idea that during COVID people are going to get really sick of just ordering uber eats and getting sloppy food all the time. They're gonna, they're gonna want to bring the magic of a restaurant home and experience that in the home. And I've come up with a way to make people feel like they're cooking without the hard work of doing all of the prep work. So what he did is he created a, or we created a company called Provital together and Providel. You effectively get it all prepackaged in a refrigerated box. It gets delivered into your doorstep twice either in AM or PM deliveries. But you just finish it off. It's all pre chopped, it's all the recipes are then so you're just following a really simple recipe and you can create a, you can genuinely create the magic of a restaurant in your home. And after a 12 week period that business. So it took us five weeks to build it from scratch and after 12 weeks it was on $100 million run rate and it was only delivering on within 35k of Melbourne. So when you talk about tribes and connections, creating a sense of belonging and solving your need, nothing can ever scale like a marketplace. Now not everyone's going to be able to create a tribe called Provideor that solves that need in those times. But that's the type of scale you can achieve. That second core tribe in there is really anchored around retailers and they're coming thick and fast, aren't they? Whether they're calling themselves a marketplace or it's like Surf stitch where suppliers are just sending it directly to you. But this is where the Businesses have an unfair advantage, which is that unfair advantage around a great community, customer base, access to the supply base, but probably limited by capital like every business in the world. And what they're doing is they're plugging marketplace into it to do range extensions. So for example, Maya, you probably buy off Myer where you actually power 70,000 SKUs from 300 brands. You're probably buying more from the Myer marketplace than potentially you are from Myer on a daily basis. If you're shopping in that eco ecosystem. What Justin and the team have done at Surf Stitch is just extraordinary. In a short space of time you're seeing businesses like Bob Jane Tmart who you kind of going, well, how's Bob Jane Tmart a marketplace? Well, if you think of most franchise groups, the franchisor actually doesn't own the inventory. So it's about connecting the live inventory up into all of their stores. And then once you're buying tires, potentially in the future, what else could you buy with a marketplace strategy? Or you see businesses like Petstock that can't fit 70,000 SKUs within their stores or their warehouses, whether it's big and bulky items like dog kennels and different pet categories that now they can range extending to at scale or obviously recently the Woolworths group announcing what they're doing with this. So it's a phenomenon, it's not going away in that space. And then the last core category we're seeing is around brands and wholesalers. Yeah, because there's always been this conflict in business around where a brand or a wholesaler should or shouldn't play with the customer. It's kind of, I nearly liken it to a boat and a pier. So they firmly have forged them. If they're tied to the pier, they're firmly bonded tightly together. But as customers are bought in different ways through different channels and the fragmentation of how they can buy, you firmly seen those peers, the pier and the boat start to separate. And I feel as most brands or wholesalers, they've kind of got one foot on the pier and one foot on the boat. And unless you're Van Damme at a
[Voiceover]: kickboxer, it's not a nice result, is it?
Jason White: So eventually something's eventually going to snap in that natural relationship. But what we're seeing with brands and wholesalers is not necessarily waking up and thinking you're a market based, but by connection into your stockists. So when you've got a brand site and you can connect to everyone in the world selling your products and drive Sales through the traditional, through the traditional channels. It's unbelievably powerful. So that's one way the brands and wholesalers are using this. So if this retailer's got it in stock, cut them in on it. If they haven't got it in stock, no one can complain because they're not stocking it so you can ship it directly. So we're seeing this conflict actually bringing the boat and appear a little bit back together as a community. It's driving the right behavior from retailers and stockers who says now because I get your online sale, I'll put my hand up and I'll stock more of your items. And it's driving the right behavior from the brands. But then we're also seeing some great case studies from organizations like Nokia who you would never have thought would have done this in a million miles. And yet Nokia have done a brilliant job of redesigning their phone and have got a huge global community now. But what they've said is that the phone is the access to the customer. What else can I sell that connects into my phone that I don't actually have to own or ship? And you know, whether that's a Google product that's linked up or headphones. So when you actually go to the Nokia site, you can buy from these third party, these third party products as well. So you think about those three tribes, it's the, or our segments, it's those. Clearly it's the tribe, it's the retailers and it's the brand and wholesalers.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, it's nice. And I love those examples you gave because you know, when you hear marketplace, you'll probably go straight to Catch or the Myer marketplace or the more traditional marketplaces. But like you said, it could be consumer to consumer, it could be creating new businesses, it could be expanding on the current business with your scale, or it could be B2B. Like so many options there's. And what strikes me about all of those is that it feels, and tell me if I'm wrong here, but it feels like this is less about the product but about the customer and giving the customer what they want and having that and owning that relationship with the customer.
Jason White: It's actually all about the customer. So it's mapping that customer journey. It's actually trying to solve the problems that customers want you to solve for them within your ecosystem. And you know, there will always be a place for what we call mega marketplaces. You know, there's these big everything stores out there. But what we're finding is if you can actually get that whole customer experience and you can own that channel for the things that you want to be famous for. That makes sense in a curated basis for your customer journey. And you can, you know, you don't have to have that in your warehouse. You don't have to link it up. You don't have to take the risk around it. Yeah, we're finding that in spades. And Surf Stitch is a great example. Right. So Surf Stitch aren't about to gonna sell baby prams on Surf Stitch.
[Voiceover]: Right.
Jason White: But they know their customers in a mindset that, you know, their mindset is, you know, I love the outdoors and I love surfing. And if you love surfing, chances are you probably love, you know, you love the outdoors and camping and some fringe products around that you love wellness and health being. It's not the type of sport you can physically do unless you're pretty fit. And, and that's exactly what they've gone. And what they're learning out of that is what their customers want to do and don't do. And what categories can they play in and not playing, but they can do it with speed and scale and profit, which is one of the most important things.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, absolutely. And do you find that the options that you give people through Marketplace opens up their eyes and potentially even saves their business when they look at the traditional D2C model and they go, oh, we can't even do, we can't do the traditional DTC model. But look at all these other options.
Jason White: What we find is businesses are able to fail faster in this strategy. So once you've got it set up to set up a new seller and start to sell in those things, whatever they are, it takes minutes. Instead of a traditional business where you need a buyer, a planner, a marketer, you gotta stock it, you gotta ship it. So it enables businesses to fail faster and to learn faster. Most in particularly. So we're finding really, really traditional businesses who, yeah, they were starting to get into the world of. Everything's led through content, content, content. And it's a very challenging, like, you know, I, I, you know, I've played in a content space myself and it's very, it's very expensive business to be. You've got to be very, very talented to pull it off. You've got to be able to build a community around it. And they were doing that to try and own the audience, if that makes sense. That's my opinion. Own your own customer, own the audience, own the segment, own the market. But what we're finding is everyone we're working to is owning their customer journey through solving their primary needs and wants of the products that they want to purchase.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. And I think content is still powerful, but if we think back five, six, seven years ago, when everyone was putting so much into content, it was because you could build those Facebook audiences, those Instagram audiences, pretty easily because I was still giving you a little bit of organic. But even creating the content now is expensive, but then actually promoting the content to create the people to follow you makes it even more expensive. So it's not always the best strategy.
Jason White: Yeah. And then it was really built off an affiliate type of model in most instances, obviously with some advertising and your sponsored content pieces within it. And contextual commerce is going to be the affiliate 3.0 in my view. And if you're a content business and you're doing contextual commerce, well, you probably a marketplace is perfect to stitch back into those contextual commerce plugs, plugins. So we're actually seeing a fair bit of media houses in their own right, which we would put into our tribe bucket, which is their unfair advantage is their audience. How do they scale through contextual commerce, link back through a marketplace instead of things they own in their warehouse?
[Voiceover]: That's really interesting because we're seeing a lot of that, especially in the us around traditional magazines or whatever, turning actually into retailers essentially and using their content. Are we seeing that in Australia as well?
Jason White: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it, like even here, one of the predominant watch magazines has created a watch marketplace with us called Time and Tide Fish Brain, which is the largest fishing app in the world. So we're seeing that contextual commerce piece sort of flipping and moving straight past the shop front, if that makes sense, where you're competing with your traditional advertisers, but moving into that marketplace type of scenario where you're driving sales through a much, much bigger cohort of suppliers and ecosystems.
[Voiceover]: Awesome. Now, this sounds like a really straightforward idea, but I can imagine at the time where you took this to market, marketplaces aren't what they are today and weren't accepted, especially brands launching marketplaces. Can you talk us back to how you came up with the idea of Marketplacer?
Jason White: Yeah, well, probably actually minds back pre market placer existing. So a best mate and I, Sam Salter, we actually went to primary school together, so like we've been thick as thieves for incredibly long period of time and his family was heavily into cycling, so they actually owned a bike store, Sam's brother. And we're just through that family connection. We've been, we've been really familiar with the cycling industry for an incredibly long period of time. And then Sam's mum actually ran famous classified businesses from a magazine perspective in Australia. And so Sam was working in classified magazines. And then I was just, I probably took a more traditional route. Like I, you know, I did university, then I worked at KPMG and Morgan Stanley and others around, around the world. And then we were just talking one day and said, there's more bikes sold than cars. It's a passion, it's enthusiast market. People can't, in some instances, can't really afford it. They'll pay up to $20,000 for a bike, so they're going to want to trade it, if that makes sense. You're going to upgrade, downgrade, hide it from your wife or hide it from your husband. And then the Lance Armstrong, the phenomenon of the rise of cycling on the back of Lance Armstrong. And you know, Australia's one of Australia's greatest ever sportsmen in Cadell Evans. So we had, we had this, the tide coming in. When you think about business and you think of probably we had the tide coming in, we had this massive supply base, we had this massive consumer base and we just. And then we had these wonderful small businesses, but had no. How did they, how did they get online? How did they get a channel, this online world? And we just saw this opportunity if we could create a community, create a sense of belonging behind it, that we could create an amazing marketplace. And, you know, Bike Exchange is, it's a really interesting one because it's actually now in 10 countries around the world. It's in the USA, Bendelux in Europe, in South America, and there's actually very few marketplaces globally that have actually got that larger geographic coverage. So in doing all of that, we just kind of look back and said, this is way too hard. So how do you, if you're in a startup, how do you create a sales strategy, execute a marketing plan, hire people, become HR experts? Like, there's so much learnings that you don't. And you know, you're faking it to make it. You're in there, you know, you've got the hustle, you've got everything you've got in there. But at the same time, we were building a technology to use and consume every single day to solve our problems. So in 2012, we won Telstra Business of the Year and we thought then there was a really big opportunity to make it easier for people to solve these types of problems. And that has evolved massively over time. But effectively, where we really, really, really struck it out is when we made it easy for people to sell things that they don't own. No matter who they were, whether or tribe, whether they were a retailer or whether they were a brand or wholesaler. That's where that true scale come through. But we weren't two tech geeks sitting under a bench, right? We were talking to retailers, we're talking to customers, and we deeply understood the problems we were trying to solve on a daily basis.
[Voiceover]: Awesome. And when you were building out that tech stack for Bike Exchange, did you have it in the back of your mind that this would become a separate product, or was it when you got to the end that you went, oh, someone else can use this?
Jason White: We always thought that it could have been, if that makes sense. So we never limited our minds. Like there was a little bit of really sort of niche stuff at the start, but the reality is now the platform's been built over and over and over again over time. But we always thought initially it was, how do we create our own group where we could have a series of marketplaces and become a group of marketplaces. But then we actually sort of scaled up in our own heads and said, well, how can we make anyone create a marketplace? You don't have to own or operate each of them. How to become a platform, become sort of that platform revolution that can power marketplaces all over the world.
[Voiceover]: And obviously that was great for thinking with that approach. And since 2012, there's been huge advancements in e commerce platforms, Shopify coming out and doing what they've done. BigCommerce, Magento2 It's a whole different world to 2012. Was there any part of you that was scared that at some point marketplaces would just be built into one of these platforms?
Jason White: I think we're always healthily paranoid that your product's going to be cannibalized on a global scale. That said, though, we've been going for a long period of time and it's a pretty big stack now. There's no doubt where we're at a time in history where the problem's going to be solved and it can be solved by a few platforms right, like that. So. But if we can. If we can continue to focus on innovation and scale in particular for not. Not only our core customers is in the people that physically have a direct relationship with us, but from a seller community perspective, you know, we feel that power of connection is something that will put us in good stead. And it's so big. That's so such a big idea. It's not a winner takes all either. And you've seen that with the technology, when you send it with most technology stacks, you know, they can be really, really good, successful businesses. From a platform perspective. Some of those names you just rolled out are prime examples. They're all probably billion dollar plus businesses. So yeah, we feel that we'll be still in a pretty good spot. Yeah, brilliant.
[Voiceover]: And how do you see marketplaces evolving over the next two or three years? Obviously last two, three, five years has been crazy for marketplaces. What are the biggest changes that you see coming?
Jason White: Yeah, I just think growth. I just think there's never going to be a time in history where businesses can grow. Like even if you're an Australian business, because the majority of your audience is within Australia, there's never a time in this country and I don't think it will ever be replicated where you can grow like you can today. That cash is trapped here. Like you can't travel overseas. You've got the lowest interest rates in history. There's a bit of a two speed economy happening at the same time. But if you've been very unfortunately affected by the pandemic, which is very bad, or you are going incredibly well and there's not much in the middle, if that makes sense, but the cash he's there's just never been the cashier. So it's time to invest for post pandemic and it's time to really, really to scale up and drive that growth through selling things that you don't own.
[Voiceover]: I could imagine that you would have been at the forefront of a lot of that growth with Bike Exchange.
Jason White: Yeah, it was, to be honest, the majority of our customers, because when it all went down like it was only what, just over a year ago, it's been a crazy year. If you have a little bit of reflection behind it and everyone was the first instant, whether it was maslow or however you want to run the psychology through your head, but it is survival. You went that first four weeks is that you went survival and protect, didn't it? That's what I did in my own head anyway. Like I said okay, I went to my kids, I went to my wife like. But you did. I went to your parents and you made sure they were right and then obviously your core friends and then you said okay now. That's right, yeah. What do I do? What's going to happen with this company? What's going to because no one knew. And I think the government. There's mistakes made right throughout it. But I think they made less mistakes than other countries for sure. And the proofs in the pudding and that we're in this position now and as soon as it turned, everyone just went bananas. And when we. Even when we went into lockdown, you know, governments around the world with something like Bike Exchange says you get it's only safe to do two things. Ride a bike and go for a run. They even stopped them walking in some instances. Right. So Bike Exchange has just had a phenomenal year. And what's more interesting is that we feel that it's created a generational change in the way people view bikes and use bikes.
[Voiceover]: Listen to this. That's me playing my new air guitar. Our friends at Cygnet recently partnered with Air Guitar Australia and we're responsible for protecting the national team's air guitars while on tour in Australia and around the world. We are proud to announce not a single air guitar was broken while in Signet's packaging. Confused? Worried that you may have gone a little loco? I certainly am. Visit signet.net au air guitar to find out more. Was there a barrier around Bike Exchange being peer to peer, being able to. When it comes to physical.
Jason White: The majority of bike exchange use B2C.
[Voiceover]: Ah, gotcha.
Jason White: Retailers selling bikes.
[Voiceover]: Retail selling bikes. Okay.
Jason White: The limits was the stores around the world ran out of bikes.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Okay.
Jason White: It was, it was. I've never seen anything like. It was like they were looted.
[Voiceover]: Yeah.
Jason White: Globally, there were zero bikes for sale in the world at one point. It was extraordinary. They're starting to catch up now with supply, though.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. I remember going to my local bike store here. It was just after. It would have been about June last year. And Saturday morning, needed a bike for my daughter's. Her fifth birthday. Went in there. There was absolutely no way you were getting customer service. And it wasn't because they were bad. They had as many people on as they could. Literally everyone was just trying to get their hands on whatever they could. It was just a phenomenal time for bikes.
Jason White: Fights over toilet paper and bikes. Who would have thought it, huh?
[Voiceover]: Absolutely. And just the last question on the COVID side, but being in 10 countries around the world with Bike Exchange, do you see, even now, a year out, do you see differences in retail behavior between those?
Jason White: It's unbelievable, the differences. It's absolutely situational based on where you're at. Like Germany's deep into a lockdown and it's still crazy in there. And the US is starting to come out obviously with the vaccine sort of really starting to roll through at the moment. And they're starting to get into a more Covid normal situation, but it's absolutely situational based on where they're at. You even find it in the, in the psychology of the customer experiences and how you need a language that you use and, and hey. And hey. How your behaviors as a culture back into your customers need to, need to happen. You know, they've had a pretty rough run in Europe over the last, over during COVID And we're always really, really conscious. We're speaking to less fortunate people around the world than we are here. That empathy, humbleness is something that we really try and we really try and drive through.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, beautiful. Now, if people listen to this and they go, oh, actually you've sparked a few thoughts around what a marketplace could look like for my brand, especially if they're traditional retailers or just D2C retailers at the moment. What kind of, what are the most important resources that you think they need to get started?
Jason White: Yeah, so we actually have a methodology either through one of our partners or we obviously host them a lot where we've nearly got like a marketplace at university where we can actually help people go through the strategic thinking of a marketplace, the business planning of a marketplace, what technology requirements they would like to create. And because we created a category, right, it didn't exist so we had to, we had to create these tools for customers. So the actual marketplace.com website's a great resource to go through. It's got some incredible knowledge in there. And if you need additional help around that thinking, please reach out on that side to us. And you know, either one of our partners or one of the marketplace team will be in touch. But you will need to think the whole way through, from organizational structures to roles and responsibility to the tasks that you do, to non cannibalizing your existing business. So it's only a growth metric to how do you charge your customers? And then you need a technology platform that supports all of that, like live connection back into your stock so that you're not overselling things that they've run out of and to being able to process returns and to hook back into logistics companies. So there's two key things in there that deep expertise, then there's this really, really scalable, strong technology platform. And then the third thing I say that makes a successful marketplace is this deep thought of a partner within your business. And that doesn't, I don't mean equity partner but somebody who deeply, deeply, passionately cares about what you're trying to do and most importantly the growth that you want to achieve by doing it. So they're the three things that we try to, that we really try and portray across to get across to our customers that we work with.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that's nice. We've got deep expertise, the tech expertise of the tech setup and the partner deep thought throughout the organization. When it comes to the expertise. Like a lot of businesses will have E commerce managers within their business. Do you find that businesses need say a marketplace manager as well as an E commerce manager?
Jason White: Often what we find is it's just an extension of thought behind your E commerce person rather than I need a whole separate team. It depends how big you are. Like so very large organizations. Sure. But for the majority of people you're doing the same, you're in the same mindset. You just need to focus on that we call it third party product and that selling through and then returns process behind that. But yeah, it's 100% that. Right. Mindset in that e commerce manager.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, it makes sense. And I'm assuming that goes throughout the whole organization to your last point around partnership. Deep thought on the tech expertise. Is inventory the trickiest thing for most retailers to get over?
Jason White: Not really if you're working with marketplace. Because we solve that problem. Right. So for the majority of sellers connecting into marketplace it's a live, live connection. So we've got pre built connectors into Shopify, into Magento, into commerce cloud. So if you're a seller selling on a marketplace connection, it's a live situation. You know, we've solved all, you know, the buffering, all of those technical things. One of the, I think that the biggest single thing that a lot of organizations have to get their head around is nearly organizationally it's around getting the right culture to enable success of it. So it's making sure that your buyership or your planners don't think of it as a different thing, but think it as the same thing. It's getting those goals and structures lined up. So I would say that the technology risk and that connection is nearly nullified a little bit now. And it's more how organizationally you as leaders drive it through your organization to enable growth and success.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, makes sense. And like if we're honest, I think inventory is an issue for every retailer is usually the biggest issue regardless of whether you're selling direct or via marketplaces. And sounds like if, if it's a big issue for you now, it's going to be a big issue with you with Marketplaces because it's just connecting the data.
Jason White: Yeah.
[Voiceover]: If you've got inventory under control, can actually open up a lot of things. Now, what's next for yourself and Marketplace? What's next on your radar?
Jason White: Well, I think that the key for marketplaces now just comes back down to one word and that's scale and that's global scale. So we've firmly launched in America. We've got unbelievable leadership over there. We're scaling up team and customers. We're going to learn a lot. I've launched businesses in America before, but every single time you learn and you grow within yourself and then once we've got two of the sort of core markets in that growth to scale phase of the business, we're going to be in unbelievable position. What really we're trying to do with Marketplace is to create one of the best technology companies in the world. Now, if we don't succeed at that, that's okay. We've had a crack and we've failed, but we're not thinking small in any which way. So what's next is just be in the moment, be present, be ruthless in our prioritization and scale.
[Voiceover]: Brilliant. And all like the partnerships, the signs are there. You know, like we mentioned at the start, we've got Salesforce, we've got Woolworths, we've got some of those great brands that you mentioned. So it's an incredible success story so far and really proud of what you guys are doing. You know, representing Australia on the global market is fantastic.
Jason White: Awesome. Really, really appreciate those words.
[Voiceover]: Now, you've mentioned that if people are thinking about starting a marketplace or the marketplace or website is a great resource to go and have a look at some of the stuff there. How else can people get in touch with yourself or the team if they want to know more?
Jason White: LinkedIn's always a great way throughout. We're really active on LinkedIn and connect either to myself, the team or to Marketplace directly on LinkedIn. Even just following on LinkedIn, you get nuggets of gold through either content distribution that we roll out. And then the other thing I strongly encourage people to is go talk to some of our customers. Just go talk. They're all a fair chunk of them listed on the site. And just go and learn as a community because what you'll find is that the people who have done a, executed a marketplace in this phase, they're thought leaders or they're people who are. They want to be part of this community in Australia The Australian tech retail tech community is so small, so just go on to speak to some people and get those validation points for yourself as well.
[Voiceover]: Can definitely second that. I think there's something in the like you said, the deep thought around these retailers is that they're always looking for new partnerships so they're really open to having those conversations and telling you what and all of what goes wrong, what goes right, how it's helped their business. Some of the most open retailers I think are the ones doing partnerships like Marketplaces. So thank you Jason, really appreciate your time. Really excited to keep watching what Marketplace is doing. Wish you all the best.
Jason White: Oh thanks so much and and yeah, thanks for having me part of the show. It's been great chatting.
[Voiceover]: Cheers mate. I love stories like these coming out of Australia, especially in retail. It shows how we can nurture innovation and take it to the world stage just as well as any other country. The thing that did surprise me in this chat was how much marketplaces should be seen as a customer strategy, not just a product strategy. By asking yourself, hey, what other problems could I solve for my customer? Will open up your eyes to the world of opportunity ahead of you. Platforms like Marketplace just make it easier to connect and execute those dots, but again, it all comes down to your customer. How can you serve them better? I can't wait to see what Marketplace would do next. To finish up, I have three resources for you. Firstly, if you're a first time listener of Add to Cart and you want to stay up to date with new episodes, head over to addtocart.com and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll let you know every time a new episode drops as well as giving you my three takeaways from each episode and a link to the transcripts so you can know that this is an episode that you want to dive straight into. Secondly, if you want a weekly roundup of the best e commerce case studies tools and research, sign up to the High Five Friday newsletter which is delivered to inboxes at 8am every Friday morning. I read all the e commerce news and send you the bits that I think you can take action from. Sign up at 12high12high.comau hi5 and the last thing if you are looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, head over to esweettalent.com we are a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands. Check it out. Sign up to the email and get in touch with me if you want to discuss your next move. Until next time. Thanks for listening and keep those customers adding to cartoon.
