This post about Fruugo is part of Tamebay’s January 2018 Marketplaces series.
Web address: Fruugo.co.uk
Marketplace Overview
Fruugo is a global marketplace with dedicated websites for 32 countries including the UK, most of Europe, parts of Asia and also Australia and New Zealand. It offers services in 17 languages and 22 currencies and the focus is on seller ease.
At the most basic level, if you have a compatible product feed, then you can easily make your goods available. They take care of listing translations, payment processing and most customer support. You may sometimes have to deal with a customer query, they say.
The company says of its own offering: ”Fruugo simplifies buying products from around the world. Our mission is to provide great choice and the freedom to shop safely wherever you are, from wherever you want, through one global marketplace.”
Fruugo seller registration and requirements
You will need to be accredited and here are some of the requirements. Once you’ve passed a preliminary screening you’ll be asked to provide more detailed information.
You must be willing to ship internationally. But don’t worry because you can make your choices about the countries and regions you’re willing to send your goods to. You’ll need solid product data including GTINs and MPNs so that your goods can be effectively catalogued. You can list new goods across most normal verticals and they do like sellers to have a good range of SKUs.
Product listings and fulfilment
As a seller, you fulfill all your orders and tracking isn’t compulsory. When you list on Fruugo, all you do is provide a product feed in some form. That could be Google Shopping, via the API, in a CSV format or using a third party multichannel service. Providers such as PlentyMarkets and Linnworks already have integrations.
You’ll need to list your products excluding VAT or sales tax because they calculate that. Seller fees run at around 15% plus 2.35% for payment processing.
If you want to find out more about selling on this marketplace, and get in contact, find out more here.
Tamebay’s take on Fruugo.
If you already sell online, are willing to ship internationally, have a decent array of goods and have a product feed that can be easily plugged in, then you should be thinking about Fruugo.
That they take most of the strain out of internationalising your listings is a huge plus. And because you pay no fees until you make a sale, it’s also low risk. What is less clear is the extent to which getting involved is a game changer for retailers. But the anecdotal evidence we hear is encouraging. Greater consumer awareness from buyers is certainly desirable, though.
If you have you any experience selling on Fruugo, please do share your wisdom.
4 Responses
We launched on Fruugo in October through Channel Advisor. Decembers sales have definitely surprised us, before launch nobody seemed very confident about the sales volume. Integration was simple, and low data requirement. You could set up using Channel Advisor within a day.
Our only issue is we sell 80+ brands, most have some quirks such as you cannot sell in Canada or there is a different price list for US and EUR … I could go on. None of this tailoring is possible with Fruugo. You send you GBP price from our UK posting account (or which every currency applies to your country) and they do the rest. Meaning for many brands our prices on the US Fruugo are way below the RRP which could get us in hot water. The only option is not selling the brands on Fruugo which limits us considerably. We also miss the extra 20% we made in non VAT countries, this really boosted our average margin.
Overall positive sales but with its draw backs.
We have been with Fruugo for a few years now and have recently invested more time into it. It has some limitations that need to be worked on but in general, it is a good platform assuming you have an integration with linnworks or something similar and you do not have to navigate the merchant centre which is quite poor.
Fruugo have been chasing us again however they do not seem flexible enough at the moment…
As an unknown channel to us we would like to add 10-20 of our best selling products (based on eBay and Amazon sales) to their site to start with as we would obviously have to invest staff time in creating the CSV import for there site – which we would not like to be a wasted effort.
however back in 2016 we attempted to do this and were blocked by one of there team after spending time creating initial listings and no minimum requirement being mentioned, 4th Jan 2018 they emailed us chasing to see if we would like to list with them and we are hitting the same stumbling block…
They want us to commit to 1000’s of SKU’s without seeing any proof that our items would sell on the platform… As we have been stung by other smaller marketplaces (Rakuten / play.com… well we all know how that ended in the UK) we just want to see a return and that the traffic / sales are there before we spend £x in staff wages going up a blind alley…
If they are just focusing on sellers with 1000’s of SKU’s what will there USP be? as the small independents that may have 20 unique products that could sell like hot cakes will never be listed and it will just be another “Oh we can get that on Amazon / Ebay”