At the recent Retail Without Borders conference, I sat down down to talk with Ted Hettich, Head of Global Partnerships at Fruugo, to discuss how to sell on their global marketplace platform.
Fruugo are perhaps unique in their approach to cross border trade in that they only ask retailers for a single feed, unlike many marketplaces where you have to list in individual counties, Fruugo was built from the ground up as a truly global marketplace. For a UK merchant, this means sending them a feed in English with prices in Sterling and they’ll take it from their and expose your products to buyers in 32 or more countries. It really is that simple.
All the retailer needs to do is be willing to ship to the countries they sell in – if there’s one or two countries you don’t want to ship to then simply ask Fruugo not to sell in those territories. You can even turn off your home country if you don’t want to cannibalise traffic to your own domestic website. Everything else is done inhouse by Fruugo for you from your UK product feed.
Fruugo is an ‘almost everything’ product marketplace, but sports, fashion, home and garden and electronics work really well. It’s an opportunity to discover which of your products sell well in different countries around the world with minimal time investment for you. Once your feed is being distributed simply monitor sales and you’ll be able to replicate success on any other platforms that you trade on.
There are plenty of partnerships in place to manage your feed including Pentagon, ChannelAdvisor, VisualSoft and Linnworks as well as direct plugin extensions for Magento, Shopify, Woocommerce etc.
If you’re interested in signing up to sell on Fruugo, then you can sign up to their wait list at sell.fruugo.com or of course Pentagon who run the Retail Without Borders conference will be more than happy to help you get started.
2 Responses
Dont bother unless your willing to commit a lot of time and effort with no guarantee of return on the investment… they don’t let you put small batches of SKU’s live they require you to have 1000’s ready to go.
They have come fishing for our business twice and we have had the same response both times, We wanted to put ~500 sku’s live to test the platform – there response “Due to the way Fruugo operates and markets products, we know from experience that adding a handful of SKUs of Fruugo would not give you a true indication of what can achieved if we market your full range globally. Therefore we have to give priority to retailers who are willing to do so. Should you wish to supply your full range then please get back in touch. You would be required to add at least 2500 SKUs initially to be re-evaluated. ”
Having being bitten by investing in Rakuten (play.com) and seeing other platforms rise to glory then fall from the skies we feel its better to dip your toe (especially if you have a small support team) than spend a lot of time on a platform for potentially no return.
Visualsoft have on boarded dozens of retailers to Fruugo over the last 12 months. Not only is the process a very fluent one, but Fruugo almost always start generating sales for our retailers within their first month, and then build from there. We totally encourage retailers to look at a wide range of marketplaces, both big and small to ensure they reach a wider audience and achieve their full sales potential.