Fashion wholesale marketplace Joor opens China office

Joor, an online marketplace that connects fashion brands and retailers around the world, has opened its first China office in downtown Shanghai as it eyes growth in the region.

The 11-year-old New York-based company works as a virtual showroom for brands, which traditionally would meet with their retail partners in physical venues to showcase the latest collections. With Joor, showrooms become live videos, a feature that has no doubt proven useful during COVID-19.

The company also gives brands a set of data tools to analyze their sales that can inform future productions. For buyers, the benefits are similar — they are able to see which brand or product is trending and make better forecasts.

The expansion into China follows a robust year for Joor in APAC and the opening of its offices in Melbourne and Tokyo. Joor’s wholesale volume ordered by retailers in the region grew 139% year-over-year in 2021, and wholesale volume for APAC-based brands was up 419%, the company said in an announcement.

“The establishment of JOOR Shanghai will allow us to provide frictionless wholesale management to the range of fine brands and retailers across the country,” said Joor’s CEO Kristin Savilia in a statement. “It builds on our existing leadership position in North America and Europe, and we expect continued expansion across the Asia-Pacific region.”

Joor’s marketplace boasts more than 12,500 brands and over 325,000 retailers around the world to date. The company has raised over $35 million in funding, according to its disclosed rounds. Its investors include venture capital firms Battery Ventures and Canaan Partners as well as the 71-year-old Japanese trading house Itochu.

Online Fashion Marketplace JOOR Raises $15M In Series B Funding

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Where to next for online retail and the Total Commerce approach

Callum Campbell is CEO at Linnworks and today looks at where online retail will be going next and predicts that a Total Commerce approach is the only way forward. What is Total Commerce? Read on to find out more:

Callum was also a presenting partner at Tamebay Live in May, you can now rewatch his masterclass where he was joined by Cas Paton, CEO of OnBuy, and Nadia Barmada, Content & Growth, Strategist, Linnworks. The discussion centred around the future of marketplaces and why a Total Commerce approach to ecommerce will drive success, sales growth and help you scale up and capture more revenue opportunities in the new, effortless economy.

How a total commerce approach is essential in the new, effortless economy

Commerce is increasingly happening in multiple online environments, wherever consumers are spending their time. For example, social platforms being commerce enabled including an integrated checkout process, or shoppable video ads embedded into articles. Effortless commerce was already emerging as the next phase of online retail, but this accelerated over the past 12 months as shoppers were forced online, even for essentials. Consumer expectations to shop whenever and wherever they wanted to, combined with time-pushed buyers having less capacity to spend on the shopping journey, meant consumer choice has followed the path of least resistance.

Effortless consumption – or the growing expectation for convenient shopping experiences – was also a key finding in Linnworks recent survey of 1000 shoppers. The overriding takeaway from the research is that consumers want seamless, connected shopping experiences, and convenience is the main priority for most shoppers when choosing a retailer.

So what does this mean for retailers looking to grow, or even be competitive? It means that brands need to be everywhere their customers want to shop. At Linnworks we call this Total Commerce – the ability to be present in the many environments where your customers are. Delivering an omnichannel experience through your selling channels, and creating a frictionless experience so your customers can create a shopping journey based on their needs is the first step. For example, buying online and collecting in store, or offering a range of payment or shipping options at checkout.

But Total Commerce means staying fully connected to your customers, so taking your selling strategy one step further, to a complete multichannel retailing strategy where your brand is present in multiple commerce environments. This can include marketplaces, social commerce, and any other emerging selling platforms. Rather than expecting your customers to seek you out, you need to be present in the channels which they operate day to day. Facebook has coined the phrase ‘discovery commerce’ which is about connecting the right product to the right person, a reverse of the ecommerce trend for businesses to expect customers to actively search for them.

Effortless consumption and delivering Total Commerce presents two key challenges for retailers:

Firstly, staying connected to your customers by accessing multiple commerce environments simultaneously requires specialised capability and knowledge. You need to understand what your customers want in each of these channels and how to serve their needs. For example, a customer looking for your product on a marketplace may just want to find your product quickly for a frictionless repeat purchase, delivered as fast as possible, but may come to your website for a more involved brand experience or to be rewarded for their loyalty or for more complex delivery options. To understand and build the right customer experience and product mix for each selling channel requires a detailed level of understanding and constant analysis and optimisation of each channel.

Secondly, continuously adapting and controlling commerce in all of these environments simultaneously, is complex, costly and technically challenging. Being able to maintain and manage all of your selling channels with their individual logistical requirements is essential to maintaining overall control over your commerce operations. Running inventory management, order management and shipping operations efficiently is key to not only having the right product in the right place at the right time, but also to maintaining your customer experience and capturing every selling opportunity.

The key to successfully implementing Total Commerce is integrating your commerce technologies and multiple selling channels into a single selling and operations platform like Linnworks. Having full visibility and control by connecting your major carriers and fulfillment services, alongside your own technology stack will allow you to sync your operations across all selling channels. Automation of tasks across the logistics process, and complete visibility over business information is essential for demand planning and stock management to ensure maximum profitability.

The effortless economy and evolution of selling platforms offers a huge opportunity for brands and retailers to scale up and grow. To achieve this brands must commit to a Total Commerce approach both in your selling strategy and right across your operations.

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Opontia raises $20M to roll up e-commerce brands in Africa and the Middle East

Razor Group. Branded. Thrasio. These are big names in the new wave of e-commerce companies taking the world by storm. Their business of acquiring small e-commerce brands that look promising and consolidating them is quite popular in the U.S. and Europe.

The concept has sifted through those shores to Latin America and Asia, where companies like Una Brands and Valoreo have raised significant investment to acquire and build these brands. Today, the concept has made its way into the Middle East and Africa as Opontia has closed a financing of $20 million to acquire and scale e-commerce brands across the regions.

This seed round, one of the largest in the Middle East and Africa, is a mix of debt and equity financing. While Opontia does not disclose the ratio of equity and debt, it confirmed that the majority was debt which will be used to make acquisitions.

Investors include Global Founders Capital, Presight Capital, Raed Ventures and Kingsway Capital. The angel investors that participated are also notable names in e-commerce across EMEA; they include Tushar Ahluwalia, CEO of Razor Group; Jonathan Doerr, the former CEO of Daraz and co-founder of Jumia; and Hosam Arab, the CEO of Tabby and the former CEO of Namshi.

Valoreo closes on $50M to roll up LatAm e-commerce brands

Opontia was founded by co-CEOs Philip Johnston and Manfred Meyer in March 2021. Opontia has teams in Dubai and Riyadh, with professionals from Amazon, Zomato, Noon.com, Namshi, McKinsey and Uber Eats. In the coming months, the company plans to open in Cairo, Istanbul and Lagos.

Often when small e-commerce brands take off, the owner usually starts by being passionate about their product and customers. However, due to no fault of their own, most begin to reach a point of stagnation caused by constraints on working capital, operations, logistics and e-commerce commercial management.

Johnston and Meyer started Opontia to take these burdens off their back by convincing them to sell their brands and for Opontia to manage all parts of their operations. But the interesting thing, like most companies that roll up e-commerce brands, these owners will continuously be involved with the day-to-day activities of building the brand.

“We started Opontia to enable e-commerce entrepreneurs to realize the full potential of their brands. We want to do this both in terms of getting an exit now as well as benefiting from future growth,” Johnston said to TechCrunch. “We also want to help nurture and build the entrepreneurial e-commerce ecosystem in the Middle East and Africa. 

When Opontia acquires these brands, the owners get to share in the increase in profits over the next couple of years, Johnston added. “We do this so that they continue to see the benefit of their hard work.”

The two-month-old company is particularly interested in brands with at least $10,000 in monthly revenue and at least $5,000 in net profit per month. Per the categories of products, Opontia has a soft spot for less seasonal “all-weather” products, including kitchen products, bathroom, sport, home and living, cosmetics and toys.

E-commerce roll-ups are the next wave of disruption in consumer packaged goods

There are lots of startups rolling up e-commerce brands worldwide besides Razor Group, Branded and Thrasio. But none of them has sights on the Middle East and Africa yet, with their bigger and more mature target markets.

For instance, China is the world’s largest e-commerce market, with an annual growth rate of more than 30% and annual online sales exceeding $850 billion. The second-largest market, which is the U.S, stands at over $350 billion. Brazil has annual sales reaching $36 billion, accounting for 32% of Latin America’s e-commerce market. For the Middle East and Africa, these numbers are at $30 billion and $25 billion, respectively.   

Both regions present Opontia with a huge opportunity. Still, if past happenings in other regions repeat themselves, it wouldn’t be too long before the company starts facing new competition. Every business needs to adopt what model works best in a region but the founders believe the model used by companies in other markets can also serve the Middle East and Africa, despite differences in size and how they operate.

“The market in the Middle East and Africa is currently less mature than in the West, but is growing faster than any other market in the world, with the number of sellers on marketplace growing at over 50% per year,” Meyer remarked. “The business model will work here because there have been so many amazing entrepreneurs in the Middle East coming up over the last few years. It’s a great opportunity for sellers to be able to realize some of the hard work from building their brand so that they can take a break or work on their next big thing.”  

Two years ago, it would’ve been a concern if Opontia or a similar company launched in both regions, as there just weren’t enough sellers. But with the recent and continued growth in marketplace sellers, there are now more than enough brands for Opontia to acquire. Currently, there are about 5 million third-party sellers on Amazon, with 1 million joining just last year. Opontia says that its opportunity lies in the 30,000 African and Middle East sellers in Amazon and Noon marketplaces.

Opontia adds that it will scale acquired brands across their regions and to other parts of the world. The company is in talks with more than 100 small e-commerce brands and claims to have signed “several term sheets” with some of them.

Johnston and Meyer come from two distinct e-commerce backgrounds. A former McKinsey consultant, Johnston worked on e-commerce strategy, private equity and post-merger integration at the Big 3 firm. Before that, he spent years doing venture capital, investing and banking across Southern Africa, London, New York and Singapore. On the other hand, Meyer worked as the chief marketplace officer for Lazada and CEO of Next Commerce, an e-commerce enabler in the Middle East. In addition to acquiring brands, the founders will be looking to hire talent with industry experience, who will be tasked with managing and growing these brands post-acquisition.

Embedded procurement will make every company its own marketplace

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Royal Mail Amazon SFP response with collection time offer

There is little doubt that there is a Royal Mail Amazon SFP (Seller Fulfilled Prime) problem that needed solving, and Royal Mail have responded by offering Amazon merchants later pick up times.

Royal Mail Amazon SFP issues

Currently, most small retailers have a mid afternoon collection from Royal Mail and no collection on weekend days. This creates a problem for SFP sellers due to two new Amazon requirements kicking in on the 30th of June:

• Starting June 30, 2021, the order cut-off time for Prime orders will be set to 16:00 (Mon-Fri), which means your daily collection time will need to be 16:30 or after.
• You will also be required to fulfil Prime orders on at least one day of the weekend and have a collection on that day.

Royal Mail don’t want to lose your business and so they are offering later collection times and weekend collections to assist Amazon SFP sellers.

Change of Collection Time and Weekend Collection Requests

If you would like to change your collection time for Royal Mail Amazon SFP compliant collections, you need to contact your account Manager or submit a request to Royal Mail. For weekend collections submit an additional request. They do say that they can’t guarantee all requests will be granted, however will do their best to accommodate requests where they can. You need to confirm your collection changes by this coming Friday, the 4th of June 2021, to ensure you are ready for the end of the month.

There may be additional charges for a timed collection and for weekend collections depending on your account status with Royal Mail.

As one of the benefits of having a Royal Mail account, you may qualify for free weekday collections if you spend over £16,500 a year on postage (£60-£70 per working week day).

Standard Royal Mail Business collections prices

£787

Collection Type	Price per annum (exc. VAT)	Time of collection
Weekday collection		Allocated by Royal Mail
Timed weekday collection	£1,840	Chosen by you
Saturday collection	£246	Allocated by Royal Mail
Timed Saturday collection	£492	Chosen by you

Royal Mail Business collections prices with £16,500/year spend

Collection Type	Price per annum (exc. VAT)	Time of collection
Weekday collection	FREE	Mutually agreed by Royal Mail and you
Single collection	£14.58 (one-off fee, exc. VAT)	Allocated by Royal Mail

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JOKR launches in New York with a different take on on-demand delivery

For years now, the world of retail has been evolving. Whether it’s next-day delivery with Amazon Prime or subscription D2C services or on-demand delivery from Postmates, we’re growing increasingly accustomed to being able to buy something and have it arrive at our door relatively quickly.

Today, a new startup is launching in New York with a fresh take on on-demand delivery.

JOKR, founded by Ralf Wenzel (the same guy who founded FoodPanda, which later merged with DeliveryHero) promises delivery in 15 minutes or less, with no order minimums, and a selection of products that you might find in the local deli or convenience store.

The approach is centered around what JOKR calls micro-hubs, which are really just various storefronts on side streets in denser areas. The company uses data to forecast what customers will want, when, and where, to strategically organize these micro-fulfillment centers for speed.

For end users, there are no order minimums and no delivery fees.

data is the key ingredient of how we build the business to identify what customers need and put an emphasis of also on only what they need, but also when they need it. And what point of time, which day, which week which month, whether it’s in the morning or in the evening, and built a dynamic inventory and catalog management system is able to rotate inventory, provide inventory and pre forecast in suggests for customers, those type of consumer goods, and the corresponding time and if you presented and forecast the time.

JOKR procures the goods sold on the app directly from brands, manufacturers and wholesalers. In other words, you can think of the service as a sort of ghost kitchen for groceries and every day items.

“We are a platform that is not relying on any type of consumer charges,” said Wenzel. “Hence, the business is predominantly a business that generates revenue out of the respective product costs. Our ability to procure directly, and cut out middlemen in terms of wholesalers, distributors, supermarkets themselves, allows us to tap into a margin pool that is higher than that of traditional online marketplaces, which would only pick a product from existing stores, supermarkets, and then need to apply a delivery fee in order to make their proposition work.”

The company is working to increase its inventory, which currently includes more than 1,500 items.

In terms of the workforce, JOKR delivery people are full time employees.

JOKR has been operating in Latin America (Brazil, Lima, and Mexico City) and is now expanding into the U.S. market with its NYC launch.

According to TheRealDeal, JOKR has funding from SoftBank, as well as HV Capital and Tiger Global. It’s unclear how much the startup has raised.

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Top ten mood boosters include sun and online shopping

New research, launched today by InPost, reveals that after a year of Covid uncertainty finding ways to lift our mood is now more important than ever.

The new research – based on a survey of over 2,000 UK adults found that with restrictions and lockdowns having been in place for over a year now, 73% of Brits feel that life has become monotonous and repetitive. While this is unsurprising, as a result, people are finding that small moments of joy in everyday things have increased in importance, with 80% of respondents cherishing the little things in life.

With people being cooped up indoors due to lockdowns and social distancing, it’s no wonder that sunshine and good weather were revealed as the top mood-boosters for 84% of Brits. A whopping two-fifths (38%) of respondents said that they feel a walk in the sunshine is the ultimate mood-boosting treat.

The good news is that shopping (online, not in store) is firmly in the top 10, even coming ahead of exercise. With people in a good mood and enjoying the sunshine, a quick bit of retail therapy bodes well for online retailers. With Amazon Prime Day announced for the 21st-22nd of June and a free tenner to spend on Amazon if you buy from a small business in the run up to Prime Day, this month could be set for a record June sales period.

UK’s Top 10 ‘mood boosters’

1. Sunshine and good weather (84%)
2. A walk in the sunshine (38%)
3. Spending time with family and friends (25%)
4. Watching a film (24%)
5. Chocolate (22%)
6. Reading (22%)
7. A glass of wine (19%)
8. Shopping online (17%)
9. Exercise (16%)
10. Takeaways or meal kits (16%)

As we look ahead to the next 12 months, it’s unsurprising that 78% of Brits are looking forward to life going back to normal and are eager to find ways to have fun and enjoy life to the fullest.

“It can be hard to find ways to boost your mood during a pandemic, but that’s not to say it’s not possible. Our research highlights that an effective route to happiness isn’t necessarily through experiencing major events that we might have planned out such as going on a holiday or to a wedding. Instead, it’s the small — and often simplest — things that can make us smile in our everyday lives and that can help to lift our spirits.”
– Jason Tavaria, CEO, InPost

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Experian partners with Microsoft to help businesses prosper

Experian have recently announced a new partnership with Microsoft which will help global businesses prosper by providing them with the tools they need to make more informed, intelligent decisions with their data and deliver better outcomes for their customers.

Businesses that are Experian customers now have quick, efficient, and easy access to a range of Experian data solutions through Microsoft’s AppSource and Azure Marketplace – the online application stores that provides a tailored catalogue of certified, cloud-based business solutions.

“Having accurate, complete, valid and well managed data is essential for businesses to deliver better outcomes for their customers. The publication of Experian’s suite of products provides access to the solutions that can really help them achieve this and unlock the many opportunities that data can bring.”
– Andrew Abraham, Managing Director of Experian’s Global Data Quality division

The development comes at a time when the importance of cloud hosted solutions has been further emphasised by the Covid-19 pandemic and the acceleration of digital transformation projects. Business users globally can access Experian’s Aperture Data Studio as well as real-time address, email and phone validation APIs through Microsoft Azure and Microsoft AppSource marketplaces.

Business users globally can access Experian’s Aperture Data Studio as well as real-time address, email and phone validation APIs through Microsoft Azure and Microsoft AppSource marketplaces. The availability of Aperture Data Studio in Azure Marketplace allows new and existing Microsoft Azure clients to access the product under a BYOL (bring your own license) model. Whilst Experian’s real-time validation APIs can be seamlessly integrated into Microsoft’s suite of business applications to help customers better manage the customer contact data entering their organisations.

“We’re pleased to welcome Experian to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, which gives our partners great exposure to cloud customers around the globe. Azure Marketplace offers world-class quality experiences from global trusted partners with solutions tested to work seamlessly with Azure.”
– Jake Zaborowski, General Manager, Microsoft Azure Platform at Microsoft Corp

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