Today Ben meets one of the premier marketplace experts: Jorrit Steinz, Founder & CEO of ChannelEngine and, above all, a serial entrepreneur. Jorrit just enjoys the development and growth of new and exciting business opportunities, and in this fast-paced episode Jorrit takes us on a wild ride through his career and the ever-changing ecommerce landscape. Sit back, relax and try keeping up with Jorrit! Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs. Find out more at: www.shopware.com/en/
Today Ben meets one of the premier marketplace experts: Jorrit Steinz, Founder & CEO of ChannelEngine and, above all, a serial entrepreneur. Jorrit just enjoys the development and growth of new and exciting business opportunities, and in this fast-paced episode Jorrit takes us on a wild ride through his career and the ever-changing ecommerce landscape. Sit back, relax and try to keep up with Jorrit!
Suggest a Guest for the Commerce Famous Podcast
Commerce Famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open commerce platform for all your B2C and B2B needs.
Ben Marks [00:00:38]:
Welcome to episode seven of Commerce Famous podcast. I'm your host Ben Marks, and here with me today is Jorrit Steinz, CEO and founder of Channelengine.com dot. He's also done a lot of things in this space during the whole time that e commerce has been around. So we're going to take it all the way back to some of the earliest days, 2005. So, Yaret, why don't you tell me a little bit about your experience with all of these brands that were aggregated under SB commerce.
Jorrit Steinz [00:01:11]:
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Ben es. I've been around for a long time in e commerce space. I think the first e commerce I set up was back in 2003, building ecommerce solutions for all kinds of companies. And then as a sort of a side business, started Sbcommerce with one shop with one of my customers, had some dinner and beers, and that's where the best ideas come from. So in the end, we ended up with more than 75 e commerce stores running on one big backend, different brands. And that was in a period of time that it was very easy to optimize for the search engines because Google wasn't populated with all these Google adwords on top. There was no Google shopping.
Jorrit Steinz [00:01:51]:
So all we had to do is register a very cool domain name, make sure we have relevant products and do link building on there. And then we also recognized that we didn't have a big brand. So we started doing all kinds of white label shops for well known platforms for a social media network in the Netherlands before Facebook came in and ruined it all. E commerce store for TNT post so gift store with television commercials and stuff like that. And we had to build everything from scratch because back then there was no good solution available. So I think there was always commerce around. So we built everything from e commerce solutions on the front end to warehouse management, automated purchasing system, et cetera, et cetera. And then we launched our own marketplace and then we started selling our marketplaces.
Jorrit Steinz [00:02:40]:
And that's a little bit of the bridge towards to what I'm doing now. So helping others connect to marketplaces.
Ben Marks [00:02:46]:
Yeah. So you, I mean, that's just an amazing story already that you all solved a problem, and immediate. And these are some of my favorite solutions in this space. Whether it's hosting or some other adjacent technology, there's a problem to be solved. Like, we don't really have a suitable platform to work with. Okay, we'll build our own. We don't have a wms. We'll build our own.
Ben Marks [00:03:05]:
And then as word gets out, people say, well, hey, they've already built this infrastructure. Let's just jump on what they have. And so that was kind of, I guess that was the path to the 75 b, two C webshops that ended up underneath that banner, and that kept going until 2015. Now, do you happen to remember what was the stack like or the various stacks? Was it.net based? Was it PHP?
Jorrit Steinz [00:03:33]:
Was.net based? What we did back then, it was all one big solution on one database with lots of ecommerce sites. So nowadays, you would have all these solutions we had back then, inventory forecasting, sales forecasting, purchasing, all in different SaaS solutions that you connect. Back then, there was no option. So we had to build everything ourselves, which is a good learning as well. But we were continuously in a sort of a beta version, continuously deploying and testing and stuff like that.
Ben Marks [00:04:02]:
Hey, Google, Google proved that mode work. Beta mode works really, really well. I think Gmail was in beta for I don't know how many years, but for the young ones listening in, it might sound strange that all of this would be part of a super monolith. But you have to realize, in 2005, cloud computing wasn't a thing. There were no commodity deployments. If you wanted to put something in what would eventually be known as the, the cloud, which is just some functional endpoint somewhere in someone's data center.
Jorrit Steinz [00:04:36]:
Yeah. So it was real physical boxes in the data center. I remember the very early days when we had a big outage at our hosting provider, and then we wanted to move to a new hosting provider, new data center. Anyway, so it was out for a long time. We drove there, got the servers on our back seat on the highway, and then a customer calls like, why is there side dining? I said, yeah, the service in the back seat. We're moving data centers.
Female Narrator [00:05:05]:
Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source e commerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25 billion in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in e commerce@shopware.com. dot.
Ben Marks [00:05:27]:
How do you, how do you.
Jorrit Steinz [00:05:29]:
Yeah. Benefit from a disaster. But then afterwards we were up and up and running again.
Ben Marks [00:05:37]:
This I had, I had Rick Wat, I had Rick Watson on not too long ago, another great personality in the space. And he, he actually had a similar story about, you know, it was time to upgrade or they needed. They basically had to take the server physically from the corner of the office and drive it over to a data center. Amazing to think about all of that value and information just riding along, strapped in, hopefully into a backseat like our.
Jorrit Steinz [00:06:01]:
Vp product in Texas. Never waste a good crisis. So if it's done anyway, just let's do it.
Ben Marks [00:06:07]:
And always a lesson to be learned. And like you said, this was just tremendous. This was hands on experience, figuring out probably a lot of what didn't work, things that would work, and preparing you then for, for this journey into what would become the future of commerce deployments with cloud being a thing and with the need to connect stores to multiple marketplaces, because of course, stores have to go where the customers are. And over time, I'm not as familiar. I think this was mostly in and around the dutch market, is that correct?
Jorrit Steinz [00:06:47]:
Yeah, it was a bit early in the market back then because our e commerce stores were in the Benelux market. By that time, we had 30,000 different skus with all kinds of products ranging from telecoms accessories to home and living products, to barbecues, etcetera. And then we started selling on Amazon and eBay and bob.com in the Netherlands. And then as a company, what I saw our teams were building all these custom integrations with the marketplaces. And biggest challenge then is that the commercial teams don't have any option to do filtering. So we didn't want to sell everything everywhere. We had 30,000 skus. Some brands were not allowed to sell, some weren't profitable, some barbecues.
Jorrit Steinz [00:07:27]:
Selling them to Belgium will yield a lot of returns because they have different fittings for gas connectors. If you send betting to Germany, you will get all of them returned, because in the Netherlands it's open on the other side, so they think it's broken. So you need to have that commercial layer that was missing in the marketplace. So instead of just building everything custom made, we decided to build a SaaS solution. So in that period of time, I sold my previous company to really focus on channel engine, to build a platform that's super scalable. And then I already knew that a lot of companies have their back end systems, erp systems, warehouse management. They're not going to replace that, but you need that flexible layer to connect to basically anything. Everything is moving towards interconnected sales, whether it's a marketplace, social media becoming a marketplace, whether it's your shop as one of the channels and you want to synchronize everything.
Jorrit Steinz [00:08:22]:
So the idea was relatively simple. Just build one connection to many and then build a layer in between. And naturally it takes a lot of time to really build a mature solution out of it. So that's what we did over the last couple of years. Back then, a bit early in the market. First idea was ten years ago. So spoke to brands.
Ben Marks [00:08:44]:
Yeah, channel engine. This is 2014, right. So this really was prescient to see. Hey, this is probably the direction this is going. These stores, they have all their data online, they have their operations probably more and more connected into the cloud as opposed to running on, running off as 400s in a warehouse somewhere. Not to say that there aren't still.
Jorrit Steinz [00:09:09]:
Customers on the As 400. We connect that to the new world.
Ben Marks [00:09:14]:
This has been a recurring theme in this podcast as lots of people have talked about. Yes, they're still as 400s because they're bulletproof and they just don't go down and they just sit there and they just have a nice little API and connect in. But you all were at the forefront of this then at the same time actually going to step over to the side a little bit because you have also. Was it Tritech? That's how it's pronounced? Yeah, Tritex. So. And from what I can tell, it looks like. So this is, this is solving, you know, b two, b two c brand to consumer needs for some, some really substantial brands. And if I saw it correctly, you know, it's sort of, it's, it's gone into the land of Pim now.
Ben Marks [00:09:57]:
Right? Is that, is that a fair way to characterize it? What is that? What was that journey like?
Jorrit Steinz [00:10:01]:
Yeah, basically what I started doing was very early beginning, we were launching a concept called website Lease. Fixed monthly fee for a website or Webshop, well, you know, all call it SaaS. And that was the early journey. So we started building commerce solutions for smaller companies, bigger companies, then started building warehouse management systems or connections to warehouse management systems. And that started growing later on when we were running our own e commerce operations. We needed more and more functionalities. So we launched channel engine as a platform. We were missing BIM capabilities, so we built out BIM capabilities and instead of building all these custom ecommerce solutions, we started transitioning into what is the most scalable need in the market.
Jorrit Steinz [00:10:46]:
And that's building a Bim that's building a marketplace integration layer and really building it out from there. Also with all the learnings from the past, because we did all kinds of custom solutions, and custom solutions are not very scalable. So we went into, how do you do this at scale worldwide from the get go, multi language, multi currency, making sure the world can be connected. Because in my opinion, borders shouldn't exist. You should be able to transact and work anywhere in the world, and that's what we see our customers doing at the moment. So instead of having all these different boundaries before you start selling somewhere else, you need technology to solve that, or partners that can solve that because they already did it back then. When we started, we had to build our own warehouse. We had to reinvent everything ourselves.
Jorrit Steinz [00:11:39]:
Now you can just plug in a three pl somewhere or use fulfilment by Amazon or fulfillment by Zealander instead of s, just connect it and start selling. So it's much easier to scale at an international level.
Ben Marks [00:11:51]:
And I see, you know, I see some of the other, the many, many things that you are working on. I mean, I've met at least one person who I could have called Mister marketplace, but I think you're really, you're taking that to a whole new level. But it was really interesting what you said about, you know, borders shouldn't exist. And I mean, we can see that as impediments to checkout. We can see that as commerce, cross border commerce. But I also see you working on solutions like you're an investor and advisor at Tapper, using QR and NFC tech. To really, my takeaway from the description is to remove yet again another impetus. Just make the buying journey, make the interactive journey more seamless.
Ben Marks [00:12:38]:
Is that a fair way to characterize that?
Jorrit Steinz [00:12:40]:
Yes, definitely. Very near future, it's going to be an obligation to have product passport so you can trace the whole product journey. But one of the biggest opportunities is for brands that sell direct to consumers. It's like we've got customer data, we can remarket them, get them in our flow, our marketing flow. Then you start selling on marketplaces. What do you do? Then you get some data, you get the address information, but it's hard to remarket them. So what you can do is with NFC tag or QR code, get them back into their funnel, in your funnel, see their whole customer journey, and then drive traffic again to that specific marketplace where they bought to do more sales. And that sounds counterintuitive, but if you drive traffic to that marketplace itself, you can boost your sales velocity so you start selling more and more, and the higher you boost your sales velocity, the easier your products will be found on those marketplaces and generate more organic traffic.
Jorrit Steinz [00:13:35]:
So it all ties into each other, but it's really to get that whole customer journey. So in my opinion, if you're selling, whether you're retailer or brand, you need to be there where the consumer is and then make sure you can re engage with them through any channel possible.
Ben Marks [00:13:52]:
Now, I'm curious because for many years, especially when I was traveling a lot around Asia, interacting with developers and stuff, blockchain, when it came out, was just the. It sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room, I think in terms of where people were ending up and the kind of work they were doing and where they were innovating. Is this a use case? Does blockchain figure into tapper at all?
Jorrit Steinz [00:14:17]:
There are some use cases there. It's too early, so we tested out things with the blockchain. For a lot of brands, it's one step too far. But the traceability of blockchain for product passports, definitely one of the super important use cases. And it's something you will see more and more in e commerce now. Nobody talks about cryptos, or at least way less than they did a couple of years ago when it went up, because everybody felt like they were a genius because they were making money. And I was like, my portfolio is underwater. Mine too, but time to buy.
Jorrit Steinz [00:14:51]:
But the underlying technology is super interesting. So instead of having one centralized database, keeping track of all the logistics around the globe is an interesting development.
Ben Marks [00:15:02]:
Yeah, it was just, there was an, on national Public radio, there was just a feature on it involved Beanie babies and, you know, just talking, but talking about it from, I think, a modern perspective in terms of stores of value. And it does make sense when something comes out and people believe it as a store of value. Yeah, the exponentiality of the hype around that, it is good that it's come back to earth and maybe we can find some good uses for this space. But I want to jump back into the marketplace discussion because I think a lot of what we're talking about here, it could be seen as a little bit like infrastructure, and I've seen this emerging more and more. I've had a pleasure of meeting Chris Bach from Netlify and the Mock alliance and chatting with him, chatting with Kelly from Mock alliance and commerce tools, really looking at the emergence of how much infrastructure is now a part of it, a part of a solution, a solution's value. I mean, of course, SaaS was, I think, the original approach for providing for bundling infrastructure in with a feature set. But as we start to tease out and separate systems but bundle them together, the orchestration is the only thing holding us back. So you look at, for example, microservices philosophically, what a fantastic approach to have everything nicely siloed, but with full capability to be composed and interact with, however it needs to interact with other features.
Ben Marks [00:16:44]:
But that comes at a tremendous cost of overhead with orchestration. And so I see any solution like channel engine that offers a really seamless, almost one stop integration. Like you all have created the connection and really reduced any kind of impediment for someone to have not just product data, but channel engine integrates your warehouse information and everything else into the solution and updating prices and keeping that consistent look and feel. So no matter where a consumer, and let me know if I'm pitching channel engine correctly here. So when a, you know, when a consumer, wherever a consumer encounters a brand or brand's products, whatever channel, they're in social media, on a, on a marketplace, they're going to get the same information, they're going to see, they're going to have a very consistent product presentation. And I would think that as brands, especially larger brands, figure out more and more that they have, they have got to provide their product, their catalog and services in all these different places, they're going to pull their hair out without a solution that seamlessly unifies it. That has to be, was that always the vision with what you saw for channel engine? Or is that something that has evolved over time?
Jorrit Steinz [00:18:19]:
It has evolved over time. The vision was there to help brands do that, because I saw everything shifting towards marketplaces a bit early. So a lot of brands saw marketplaces, something that their resellers were doing, a lot of retailers saw marketplaces competition. But at the moment, it's inevitable. All brands need to embrace marketplace, and not even just for revenue, but they need to be in control of the content. So like you said, it's not just the infrastructure connecting an API or your backend system or your BIM system to any of the channels. You need that orchestration layer that is super focused on doing this at scale. So there's always a big difference between your data source and what a marketplace needs, or what a social media needs, or what the webshop needs, and the transformation of data, you can do very focused in channel engine at scale.
Jorrit Steinz [00:19:09]:
So if you don't have that, it's going to be very hard to manage all your content everywhere to make sure all your stock levels are synchronized, etc, etcetera. So that's why we built this platform. But it's not just for marketplaces. Anything you want to put as an endpoint to the API you can use. We've got customers using it to feed their apps or to connect to their in store portals or stuff like that. As long as it's product content, orders, pricing, shipments, so basically everything e commerce and you can manage through a single solution. One of the critical points, if you do ecommerce at scale, you want to reuse different logistics locations. So if you have ten items in stock and you can sell it on four different platforms, as soon as you sell them one, you want to take it off the others.
Jorrit Steinz [00:19:58]:
Otherwise you do double sales. Other stuff, if you want to sell something on a marketplace, I don't know, this cup way too cheap. If you sell one, if you sell a six pack and a bunch of plates, makes sense to create virtual bundles. So that's the stuff channel engine does at scale. And then you can leverage a large network of third party logistics providers. Because if you're a brand or a retailer and you want to sell in a new region and you don't have logistics, how easy is it if you can just plug in a three pl, just ship a container like you're used to and then have them ship to the end consumer. So a lot of these bits and pieces to build for them.
Female Narrator [00:20:35]:
Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source, open source e commerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already processed over $25 billion in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in e commerce@shopware.com. dot wow.
Ben Marks [00:20:56]:
So half of the things you mentioned were not they sound, of course, that's what I say to myself, of course, when I hear you say them. But thinking about, oh, wow. Yeah, different marketplace, it would make more sense to bundle things, get your average order value up, get your sort of the logistics cost for we've got fast.
Jorrit Steinz [00:21:16]:
Moving consumer goods companies selling coffee cups and dishwashing powder and stuff like that. That's not profitable if you sell the one by one. So if you create new bundles, new virtual bundles, that's like one Asin or an card on a platform, then it makes sense. And we keep track of all the underlying stock. And because we launched this, there's all kinds of solutions. We've got beer manufacturers having six different kind of special beers in one package, selling it as a gift, barbecues and covers plants and pots and stuff like that. So super fun stuff coming up. And we just launched generative AI, of course, to generate titles and descriptions to make it easier to launch more and more of these bundles.
Jorrit Steinz [00:21:57]:
Super effective to increase the top line as well as the bottom line.
Ben Marks [00:22:00]:
Yeah, I mean, I'm really excited for the shopware was, who was my employer. We were, I think, first to market, actually, among all of the e commerce solutions, we were first to market with something even beyond generative AI, where we released, I think, eight AI features back in May that were even. I was a little bit nervous when I heard us talking about AI because of course, again, this was a moment of hype for everything, but you dig into the features and it was really just practical, pragmatic, this is AI iterative approach to supercharging what the merchandisers, the store ops folks can do, basically helping their job, helping them do their job faster with AI and at a practical level. And I think back to the orchestration point, orchestration integration infrastructure, AI will. I see a lot of investment and a lot of stories being told in this space. So I think we are going to see just a little bit. We won't even feel it doing its thing. It's just all of a sudden somehow these endpoints, they're going to work a little bit more smoothly.
Ben Marks [00:23:10]:
And the orchestration of services is just going to happen naturally because someone was able to say, oh, hey, we need this. I can see sometime in the near future where it's like, okay, we're going to have a flash sale. We need to, you know, we need to uplevel our service so that we can deliver without falling over. And you very well may have you literally just naturally communicate this into a system and the system handles the rest. So that I'm really excited about. But it's interesting, you know, something you just said about it, not just marketplaces, it's really, you know, it's really endpoints. And so there I'm starting to see, wait, this isn't, this isn't like a miracle or some other marketplacing solution. This really is an integration environment.
Ben Marks [00:24:04]:
And I think that with the rise, we're seeing a rise in interest in integration environments and we're having some great conversations with these iPAss providers, but it sounds like you all just naturally built your product in that direction. Has that been a little more recent or was that just always there?
Jorrit Steinz [00:24:26]:
Was always there because we use it ourselves as well, to just pop in new data feeds or make sure you have a custom channel because there's always a customer that wants to connect something. It's like we've got the product information, we've got the orders, we've got the stock levels, pricing. So why not just connect anything? And the fun thing is our network has grown also because marketplaces that are smaller, that didn't fit on a roadmap, they connect to us. So we are growing a massive network at the moment because they can benefit from it as well. Lots of great sellers on our platform. So if a new marketplace connects, they get more sellers that are already used to selling on marketplaces at scale. And there's a big distinction. We also work together with iPass solutions to connect the back end system.
Jorrit Steinz [00:25:10]:
The layer in between what we have is super focused on e commerce, profitability, pricing, competition, content. So it's completely focused on doing e commerce at scale. Doesn't matter what kind of channel it is. And a channel can be a marketplace channel can be your own DTC sites. We've got social commerce connected. Basically. Anything that can be transactional and everything will be transactional can be connected. And I've been speaking about social commerce for a very long time, and I find it gets some traction, especially in Southeast Asia, but also a lot of retailers, a lot of brands I spoke to many years ago just sell b, two b orders to a retailer.
Jorrit Steinz [00:25:51]:
What we've seen happening over the years, especially last year, these retailers are buying less because money is expensive, so they don't want to run that risk on their inventory. So they're all launching marketplaces, many of them on miracles, some on marketplace, etcetera. And they're pushing the brands to sell on their marketplace. So now the brands have to do it. But it's a massive opportunity for some retailers as well, because if you have very niche or great products, just push them on other people's marketplaces. We actually have marketplaces using our solution to sell their own white label products on other marketplaces. It's insane. Everything is becoming connected in e commerce.
Ben Marks [00:26:32]:
The money is always, you know, there's always money to be made, you know, on two sides of bundling. Bundling or unbundling. Right?
Jorrit Steinz [00:26:39]:
Yeah.
Ben Marks [00:26:40]:
And this sounds like we are in a, we are at a period where it just becomes, because of, I guess, the direction and because of the technology, it just becomes easier. If you can figure out a few key things about your operations, you can just push onto other people's infrastructure and just do what you need to do to stay at the top and back. What you were saying earlier about making sure that everything is optimized, optimization necessarily means better sales. Better sales. It's this virtuous feedback loop. You'll perform better. Your products will probably be placed higher within each of these marketplace environments, and you get more sales and so forth and so on.
Jorrit Steinz [00:27:22]:
Maybe one thing is super interesting. If you look at brands and retailers, it's not about just doing more sales, it's more about regaining control. So if you look at brands, like regaining control of the content on all the different marketplaces, who is selling it as well? Are your resellers selling it, but also determining whether your new product launch is available. So you have a new product launch. Typically you rely on a vendor manager buying it from you. If they don't buy everything, you don't have your full collection life. So if you're not on the marketplace and able to ship it yourself, then you don't have that control to determine what is available, what pricing are set, etcetera. And then you can leverage the infrastructure of the marketplaces, for instance, fulfillment by Amazon or Solana fulfillment service in combination with your own logistics.
Jorrit Steinz [00:28:11]:
And if you nail that, then you're in full control, because sometimes you will have bought too much yourself and then you have overstock. And maybe you want to dump that on a specific marketplace in different country to not hurt your own retail channel locally. Or maybe you just want to launch in a new market where nobody knows you and you want to position your products in between other brands. There are so many opportunities once you have this infrastructure in this orchestration layer in play to determine what to sell, where, how to make it profitable, but also adjust if you get less purchase orders from a specific reseller, et cetera, et cetera. So massive opportunities, so interesting.
Ben Marks [00:28:52]:
I guess that's putting so maybe the way it was before, or as brands first dipped their toes in the waters of marketplace, they're really just having to take educated guests, basically. They're not as close to the transaction, they're not as close to the customer. And so they're having to take best guests and deal what they deal with and then deal with the reporting out so that they are a little bit disconnected. So you're both putting them closer and then you're also sort of normalizing the, the international markets. It wouldn't occur to me like, oh yeah, well, something's happened and we have all of this stuff sitting here in Benelux, but this is a whole new category that's not there in South America, Central and South America. So we can, let's throw it in a container, let's launch here and the cost of that launch is literally is basically nothing because we're already plugged in with this vendor that's made the world accessible to us. That's incredibly powerful. I mean, how do you, is there a lot of education that goes on for your customers where you show them the way? Because it sounds to me like you guys are leading, you're at the forefront of all of this.
Jorrit Steinz [00:30:11]:
Yeah, there's a lot of education also internally, so new people coming in, the amount of opportunities is massive. So helping them make the right decisions is paramount because you can spend a lot of time on one marketplace, for instance. A lot of companies starting the marketplace journey always start on Amazon because the most consumers are on Amazon. The thing is to be found with your own products. On Amazon you have to compete against 600 million products. So sometimes it makes sense to just sell on, I don't know, on bol.com in the Netherlands or start selling on Macy's or on Zalando depending on your product vertical, because it's easier to rank there and have really good results and then start on Amazon. And if you go on Amazon, just create a subset of your products where you can really win instead of just dumping everything on it and then hoping for the best. So do it strategically.
Jorrit Steinz [00:31:08]:
And that's what I've seen happening in the last two years. Instead of everybody just using this as just testing it out as a beta, it's like, holy shit, our business is going to change massively. We need to nail this. So all of a sudden everybody's involved. And then some companies need to restructure their internal teams as well because I see internal competition between somebody incentivized on b, two b orders and then direct to consumer marketplace come in and they start colliding internally. So there's a lot of changes and that's where we help some customers as well. How do you structure that? How do you do this at scale? Well.
Ben Marks [00:31:46]:
For an individual brand to do this, even an enterprise sort of brand, that would be, I mean, that would just, it's a whole different skill set. It's an almost impossible amount to learn. And really, whereas there is something like channel engine that exists, I think would be hard to justify that. I mean, if you have to explain to a board why you spent a billion dollars figuring out how to, you know, homogenized the experience for, you know, across the lands and they were like, well, yeah, but you could have spent this much over here and it would have been done for you. And by the way, it would then be continuously improved because that's their business.
Jorrit Steinz [00:32:29]:
You'll be amazed how many large companies still do excel manual updates while mid size, we see some awesome midsize companies that are just connecting it. We've got one customer doing massive amount on over 50 marketplaces with two people managing all these marketplaces. It's insane. But they are executing extremely well.
Ben Marks [00:32:54]:
Yeah. And we see for our customer profile, we really find a lot of value and benefit and fit with the mid market. So, you know, as you're dealing with, you know, 50 to one hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue, in large part because it seems like in that, in that stage, even if the, even if that's a company that is growing its way to, you know, billion plus in revenue, you, you have a lot of, you have a lot of bright people who are really focused on, you know, executing incrementally better and better, more efficiently. And so they're going to find the right tools, they're going to, they're going to find the right practices and they need to be able to iterate quickly. And I'm going to guess that that's another advantage of a channel advisor, is you can test out these ideas, you can test out new marketplaces and new geographies without a significant investment. You're not having to invent all of this stuff from scratch. So you can say, hey, we think this will do well. Okay, let's have the experiment.
Ben Marks [00:33:58]:
Okay, that didn't do well. What did we learn? Can we increment and win there? Or do we just now have a good lesson and a better understanding of our product market fit that we can take those learnings elsewhere.
Jorrit Steinz [00:34:10]:
And sometimes it's also good to realize it's not an isolated thing you do. So we've got customers that launch in new retail stores in a new country where they're not known yet. And what I started doing is loading their products on, in this case Zalando, in between very well known brands. And you saw the halo effect of people ordering online in the stores. So that way you can just really load your brand utilizing the traffic and the amount of interest on these marketplaces. So don't look at your p and l just purely from that specific one time sale, but look at the whole region where you start selling. And like you said, there are different teams. So sometimes we've got customers, a couple of million per year in e commerce sales to billions, and there's a huge range in between.
Jorrit Steinz [00:35:00]:
And sometimes the 10 million company is doing way better than a couple of billion company because they have to restructure everything internally, everything goes slow. But sometimes you've got a few, couple of billion companies that have a tiny, very innovative team and they're executing extremely well. So I think that's my biggest advice for bigger companies. Isolate your team, make sure the goals are aligned and give them freedom to execute on this on a global level, not regional. Otherwise you have to do a lot of politics to get this stuff going. Create one superstar team, it doesn't have to be super big, and then let them do this.
Ben Marks [00:35:37]:
Okay, well, that sounds dangerously like advice for success and a prediction for the future. What do you see coming down the pipe? I mean, is it just going to be more and more marketplaces creeping in everywhere? Is it going to be something else?
Jorrit Steinz [00:36:01]:
I think it's going to be a marketplace war. Everybody wants to get the transaction. So there is going to be more and more marketplace. There will be a lot of marketplace not succeeding. So I see them as well that don't get the traffic. So I think the bigger players that do this super well and invest on it, whether it's a retailer that become a marketplace, or brands or retailers that leverage marketplaces, make sure you have a superstar team. It doesn't have to be super big, but they need to be trained, they need to have some autonomy to do this well and try to avoid internal competition because you want to avoid all the politics of somebody working against them because it hurts their personal bonus. So make sure the goals are aligned, otherwise you're going to lose out because consumers are searching on all these different platforms.
Jorrit Steinz [00:36:57]:
You need to be there, and it's not super easy to do because it's not just Amazon. If you go into Southeast Asia, you need shopping in Lazada, you need to be there. Southeast Asia has a lot with vouchers and discounts and stuff like that. Us, different marketplaces, Latin America, different marketplaces, Europe, massively in different marketplaces, different languages. But you can leverage the same logistics flows, the same customer service flows, etcetera. So small, super smart teams, good technology, you can do a lot.
Ben Marks [00:37:32]:
So my takeaway is stay nimble, empower the right people, and if I can take it maybe one step further, maybe pick a solution that allows you, rather than putting all of your eggs in one marketplace basket, why don't you pick a solution that lets you treat these different marketplaces almost as a commodity to your own success?
Jorrit Steinz [00:38:00]:
Absolutely.
Ben Marks [00:38:01]:
Well, I think this was a great conversation. I've learned a lot about the marketplace perspective and just the advantage of relying on the people who've helped maybe invent some of this category and who are continuing to innovate in this space. So really, thank you so much for your time. And just congratulations on what has obviously been a career filled with tons of interesting work and some really good successes. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what you all are doing in the future.
Jorrit Steinz [00:38:39]:
Thanks a lot. And we're just getting started building this network. It was a pleasure. Ben really enjoyed this conversation.
Ben Marks [00:38:47]:
And folks, I will say this if you don't know already, when a dutch person says something, they mean it. There is no more direction culture on the planet, so take everything at his word. Yard, it was great having you on and I look forward to catching up with you sometime in the near future.
Jorrit Steinz [00:39:04]:
Thanks a lot, Ben.