Mountain Warehouse has been offering quality outdoor clothing and equipment since 1997, but like many retailers are looking to marketplaces to fuel their global expansion plans. Having started with a single shop in Swindon the company now has over 200 stores and employs more than 1,500 people and expansion via the Internet is the next obvious step in their plans.
In the first step, a partnership with Neteven optimised Mountain Warehouse’s store, listing and order management on eBay in the UK, Germany and France. Neteven was created by an ex-eBay employee and so have strong expertise in eBay’s requirements globally.
Whilst eBay is the dominant player in the UK, the same isn’t true across all of Europe, so the next stage in Mount Warehouse’s expansion saw Neteven deploy their products on Cdiscount, a generalist marketplace owned by Casino Group, the third largest ecommerce player in France.
Everyone is now talking about China as possibly the biggest global market opening up to retailers in the Western world and Mountain Warehouse didn’t want to miss out. Neteven are already connected with the Alibaba Group’s B2C entity, Tmall Global having already launched several clients in this market and this relationship opened the doors for Mountain Warehouse to access Tmall Global marketplace.
With some tight time restraints Neteven coordinated the Tmall Global project with all parties and facilitated an extremely fast and effective launch within two months, in order for Mountain Warehouse to take part in the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival (Singles Day).
The end-to-end project involved systems integrations, account set up, store design, translation, fulfilment and customer service. Thanks to Neteven’s project management team, Mountain Warehouse is now trading on the largest marketplace in the world.
Talking of their expansion, Mark Neale, Mountain Warehouse’s founder and chief executive said: “We chose Neteven as we would not have been able to build and sustain the multiple and constantly changing integrations of all these sales channels. By working with Neteven, we have been able to increase the number of marketplace sales channels in Europe and Asia with limited human and financial investment. We chose to work with Neteven because of their unrivalled technical and commercial relationships with the world’s leading marketplaces. There is also great potential for our relationship with Neteven to evolve to include marketplaces beyond Europe, such as in Australia and the US”,
China is an attractive marketplace, not only because of the sheer numbers of consumers but also due to their worries about counterfeit goods. Often a Chinese consumer will prefer to purchase from a retailer based in the West so that they know they’ll receive authentic goods.
Getting started on Chinese sites like TMall isn’t an easy straightforward process, but partnering with an expert like Neteven can cut through the red tape and save weeks if not months to get set up and selling.
