Ahead of the Rakuten Campus 2013 event being held in Paris this Thursday, ChannelAdvisor have announced support for the Play.com marketplace platform. This will of course be a big focus at the upcoming Catalyst conference being held in two weeks time on the 3rd and 4th of June.
There’s no real surprise that ChannelAdvisor have announced support for the UK’s third largest marketplace, especially now that Play.com is no longer selling direct and won’t be competing with their customers. ChannelAdvisor already support Rakuten.com (formerly Buy.com) in the States and it was inevitable that sooner or later they’d support Rakuten.co.uk, which is what Play.com will eventually be known as.
ChannelAdvisor’s official press release did hold something interesting though – It said “Rakuten Play.com’s busy marketplace, which has categories including music, DVDs, clothing, sports and outdoor, electronics and toys, has more than 15 million users . The integration will enable retailers to take advantage of this channel and maximise the sales opportunities by using ChannelAdvisor’s solutions”. The thing is back in 2011 when Rakuten paid £25million to acquire Play.com they had 7 million customers.
Play.com must have done something really special in the mean time to double that number to 15 million, which is the number they officially tout on the Play.com website.
One Response
This is great news, channeladvisor is a central part of my business, and now having support for Rakuten’s play.com will make it even more invaluable to my business, can’t wait to get started using the new functionality and combine all my company’s multichannel online sales.