Some 75 sellers and 20,000 products have this month migrated from the Myer Market to myer.com.au as part of a two-year strategy to build and broaden the retail giant’s category base. Here we chart Myer’s journey, and our role in delivering both a short-term and sustained strategy to increase product range and grow sales.
Myer’s marketplace growth plan
In 2017 Myer partnered with Marketplacer to create a curated lifestyle destination, the Myer Market. The platform was a response to a fiercely competitive retail market and Myer’s ongoing challenges to grow market share without the need to hold or ship extra stock.
This new and separate e-Commerce platform was a solution that would broaden the direction of the traditional business, whilst retaining and supporting the huge number of loyal, fashion-oriented Myer One members.
The Myer Market facilitated endless aisles and a dropship system, which in turn provided rapid, no-risk growth opportunities. The original intent was to eventually merge the marketplace with the myer.com.au platform, a stage that came to fruition this month.
When a marketplace is the single, smartest category growth solution
Why create an entirely new and separate marketplace to start with? Why not simply begin the growth directly from myer.com.au? Because there was an easier, more cost-effective and lower risk solution available. Indeed, this two-phased approach was the single most viable path to success for a number of compelling reasons:
- The Marketplacer platform provided frictionless integrations with a variety of other platforms most commonly used by the third-party sellers, including Shopify, Magento and Woo Commerce. These APIs do not exist with myer.com.au.
- An opportunity to create no-risk endless aisles across a number of categories.
- The plug-and-play offering was a sizable saving in time and finance – Marketplacer provided a complete offering from product development through to ongoing back-end management.
- Marketplacer was mandated to deliver customer service and new business growth for the two-year tenure.
The Myer marketplace migration – a ‘headless’ operation
Having remained focused on the original end-goal, the Marketplacer and Myer teams began preparation for the migration earlier this year. The plan was to separate the Marketplacer back-end and integrate it over to Myer’s primary platform, a process commonly referred to as a ‘headless’ operation.
The benefits to Myer
The migration enables Myer to maintain all the benefits of the original marketplace with one very important distinction – everything appears as a single, seamless offering on myer.com.au.
- Headless has provided a quick and frictionless migration that avoids unnecessary cost, delays and cumbersome technical issues
- No risk growth – 75 retailers and 20,000 products simply switched ‘on’, with more already joining
- Ongoing growth via endless aisle – warehousing stock becomes redundant
- Digital presence provides an exceptionally lower cost alternative to building a new bricks and mortar store
- Ultimately reduces overheads and increases flexibility to test new products & categories and in doing so, to either succeed or fail fast
The benefits to the Myer customer
- Access to a huge number of new products and entire new categories not previously possible
- A single Myer platform avoids any confusion
- Purchases from marketplace sellers contribute to Myer One points
- All purchases are covered by Myer’s refund policy
Supporting small businesses
The Myer strategy has proven successful for SMEs Australia-wide, especially during the challenges of 2020. Presence on a site that attracts in excess of four-million visitors a month provides potential for massive growth opportunity.
- Couchmate, a small Tasmanian retailer with six products, has increased in volume of sales by 4000% per cent since joining the Myer marketplace.
- Mizzie The Kangaroo, Queensland based Kids & Baby retailer has seen over 3000% growth month-on-month since the transition to Myer.
- Myer has allowed furniture seller OOS Living to expand alongside one of the most iconic Australian household names. Increased exposure has seen sales grow month-on-month.
Find out how Marketplacer can help your business grow, too
If you operate a marketplace and could benefit from our headless technology, or you see potential to create a marketplace in your industry, contact us today. We’re available for a no-obligations conversation and assessment to see how Marketplacer can help your business grow online.
