You may be familiar with the name BitCoin and the existence of digital-currency – namely from the highs, lows, and (endless) news stories in late 2017- early ‘18. What you probably don’t know however is that as we write, digital-currencies continue to trade over $15BN every day.
It is conservatively considered that of this trade between 1-2% is directly linked to online/eCommerce purchases, that’s anywhere between £50BN-£100BN/annum. Put another way, the size of this market opportunity puts it between the 5-8th largest markets in the world, just below Japan (4th) and above Canada (8th).
Whilst you are accustomed to the many marketplaces who help put your inventory into new territories, how is it possible to win sales from this growing market? You certainly can’t win sales from the digital-currency audience on Amazon or eBay (as least as of the time of writing).
If you’re of a size to be using Shopify as a storefront, then a couple of plugins allow you to accept digital-payments on your store, but for most of our readers that’s not an option, and even if it was, you’d still have to deal with the headache of converting digital-currencies and their price fluctuations.
So how can you win these sales you currently can’t reach, without any headache? The answer, Flubit.com
Flubit.com launched back in 2010, and has remained one of the most established UK-based marketplaces. The size of their inventory (over 50M) makes them one of, if not the largest, independent marketplaces from the UK. Moreover we have a slight soft spot for Flubit as they’ve sent a team to the Tamebay Cup every year since its inception – they even recorded a win last year – luckily their marketplace makes a bigger impact than their footballers do.
In Summer 2018 flubit.com were acquired by a large digital currency / blockchain group, and over 2018 their focus moved to generate sales for sellers from the digital-currency audience. We caught up with their founder and CEO, Bertie Stephens, for a quick-fire Q&A as to why sellers should consider selling on Flubit.com.
Why should sellers consider selling on Flubit.com?
We’ve got a long history delivering thousands of sellers new orders, adding incremental sales to your Amazon/eBay returns. Whilst we continue to process fiat payments, our goal is to enable sellers to win sales they can otherwise not reach in the digital-currency market, risk-free.
What do you mean by ‘risk-free’?
We don’t believe any seller wants to deal in digital-currency just yet, therefore we automatically convert an order from a digital-currency to fiat (£) prior to sending the order to the seller – this means we have the liquidated monies in the correct payment-cycle currency for them already. A seller never knows whether they received an order paid with fiat or a digital-coin. Since going live in the Summer, we paid out £Ms of sales, and our sellers wouldn’t know that it came from this alternate market.
Is there additional payment-fraud with digital currencies?
Officially chargebacks can’t occur with digital-currencies, but even if they could, like with our fiat-paid orders, we handle any payment fraud.
We see buyers can pay 15% less if they pay with a digital-currency on Flubit.com, how is that possible?
This is the really clever part in my opinion. Firstly, that 15% discount is not coming from sellers own margin. It initially comes from ours. However due to the way we can ‘stake’ digital currencies, thanks to Flubit.com’s acquirer MonetaryUnit, we are able to generate a 30%+ ROI on payments, meaning we can generate our margin through different means at a later date. In short, sellers get the base-price they were expecting, buyers pay less (so hopefully buy more), and we end up making our core margin, just over a slightly longer period of time.
So how easy is it to get started?
To sell into the digital-currency market you need to be integrated on Flubit.com’s sellers central, it’s called SKU Cloud. The reason it’s a different brand is because it allows your inventory to not just be on Flubit.com but other platforms too (such as the MonetaryUnit app and others). We have integrations with over 30 multichannel and ecommerce software solutions e.g ChannelAdvisor, Linnworks, Magento, VOLO, Storefeeder – along with our own API, FTP & Feed solutions. There are no monthly fees.
Sign up to sell on Flubit.com today
Flubit.com has always been a marketplace that have offered something different to online sellers, and the recent acquisition and focus on digital-currencies continues that journey. It certainly won’t top your Amazon or eBay sales, but we believe Flubit.com should be considered as part of a varied multi-channel portfolio, especially as it allows you win sales in an area that currently no other marketplace offers.
You can sign up to sell on Flubit.com (via their seller channel SKU Cloud) here.