One of the interesting companies on the marketplace panel at ChannelAdvisor Catalyst was Fruugo, and afterwards I sat down with Ted Hettich to find out more.
Fruugo are a transactional marketplace with a presence in 32 countries across Europe plus the US, Australia, China, Japan, India and the Middle East. There service includes handling the transaction, payments and about 99% of all customer service issues (you might get the odd technical question or return). Pretty much all you as the retailer are expected to do is to ship the product once sold.
This is a different proposition from other marketplaces – on the likes of eBay and Amazon you’re expected to translate your listings and worry about currency exchange. Fruugo take this on themselves so you can just upload products in English at the price you want and leave all the complicated cross border stuff to Fruugo they’ll even handle VAT calculations for you.
Fruugo operate on a no sale no fee basis – so there’s pretty much nothing to lose. They have also started building out integrations with a number of partners (ChannelAdvisor were one of the first) to make uploading products a pain free process for retailers. All you need to do is make your product feed available from ChannelAdvisor (or other tools) and sit back and wait for the sales to roll in.
If Fruugo sounds a bit to easy it’s probably because that’s their intention. They want to get your product feed and start marketing on your behalf so they’re removed just about every barrier to entry they could think of. Even if all you have is an excel spreadsheet or CSV file of your product they can work from that.
Fees on Fruugo run at around 15% plus 2.35% for payment processing. Based on an average eBay and Amazon seller, you might expect to see an additional 5%-10% incremental business by adding Fruugo – they’re not the powerhouse Amazon is or the size of eBay, but could still represent a nice chunk on your profit and loss ledger.
There are two main reasons I would suggest Fruugo is a no brainer. First is that with no risk no fee, easy integration and incremental business it’s more a question of ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ rather than ‘Why would you?’.
The second reason for signing up with Fruugo is that they can offer insights into new untested territories at no effort to yourself. Ted told me of a UK book seller who signed up and naturally (as his books are published in English) they thought the UK, US, Australia and Ireland would be the top target countries. Fruugo aren’t as selective however and allowed the retailer to push their books out in multiple other countries, after all for the retailer there’s no extra effort so why wouldn’t you? The results were astonishing as they had great success in Scandinavia. Whilst it might appear that publishing in English isn’t the best way to attract sales from Finns, Swedes and Norwegians, it turns out that they’re more than happy to purchase English books if they’re made available.
Ted wrapped things up telling me that the message from Fruugo is simple – make your product feed available to them and they’ll do all the adwords and retargetting to get you sales. Your feed can be in English with no translation or localisation needed – Fruugo will do this for you. There’s no fee no sale so no financial risk and as an added bonus you might get some valuable country insights as a bonus on top of the incremental sales that Fruugo will bring.
Sign up today, what have you got to lose?
