Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Marketplacer?

Marketplacer, the Australian-based technology company, is on the rise. This week, the company announced a $38 million capital raise - a significant step for a business working at the forefront of digital commerce.

Jason Wyatt, Marketplacer's co-founder and executive chairman, joined us to speak about the company's vision and the wave of transformation sweeping through the retail and e-commerce landscape.

Marketplacer's core mission is to help organisations of all sizes create and scale digital marketplaces around the world. "Ultimately, the problem we solve is helping people create marketplaces all over the world," Wyatt explained. "People often ask me, what's a marketplace? Ultimately, where the market is heading is, if you have a large cohort of customers, if you're an existing retailer or business and you sell existing products, the ultimate problem that Marketplacer solves is the ability to connect up and sell things that aren't in your warehouse, things you haven't invented, things you don't have to ship, and you can scale with limitless boundaries around it."

In other words, Marketplacer's technology allows existing retailers to vastly expand their range without holding inventory, opening up the possibility to offer customers more choice and flexibility without additional costs or complexities associated with logistics and stock management.

Explaining further, Wyatt says digital marketplaces are revolutionising commerce, and he points to internationally recognisable success stories to illustrate. "If you think of [well known accommodation marketplace], what they were hoping to do is consolidate. The problem they were solving was you want to go on holiday but you don't want to stay in a hotel. What they were able to do was pull an experience together and solve the simple problem of ease, convenience and choice into a single destination, and they made it a wonderful experience around building that marketplace," he said.

Wyatt stressed that the most successful businesses in this new era are those who put customers front and centre. "What we're finding across the globe is there's really large organisations who are starting to value the most important thing in their business, and that most important thing is their customer," he said.

However, many businesses run into constraints - whether that's capital to buy inventory, a lack of physical space, or other limitations. "What marketplaces solve is the ability to plug the marketplace software engine into your existing e-commerce engine so you can start to be innovative, and ultimately you can start to grow in a way that you weren't able to grow before," Wyatt explained.

Marketplacer's technology, then, allows businesses to innovate and take risks without the costs and logistics that traditionally hampered expansion. The opportunities, says Wyatt, are significant, especially in the rapidly changing environment created by the pandemic. "We've gone through a generational change in COVID. Like never before in our generation have we had hardship and change," he said. "If you want to understand what change management means, go home to your partner, your wives, your loved ones tonight and ask them to sleep on the other side of the bed. That's how much people didn't like change before, but we've had so much change in our lives. So when's the right time to do it? My view is, when you've had 50 years of change overnight, which is what we've just lived through – the world has changed forever. There's never a moment in history that has the opportunity that we've got to create a marketplace like today."

As COVID forced many businesses to overhaul their models, Marketplacer found itself contributing to some remarkable success stories. Wyatt highlighted the story of Providoor, an Australian business born out of the pandemic by celebrity chef Shane Delia. "He had some institutional restaurants and basically rang us up and said, 'I'm in a lot of trouble. I've got three restaurants, a hundred staff, I'm going to go broke, there's no question. But I've got this glimmer of hope and I've come up with this idea to be able to deliver food and take the magic of a restaurant to the home in a really convenient way'," Wyatt recounted.

Marketplacer partnered with Providoor, launching an online marketplace in just five weeks—even as the pandemic raged. "Now that business is on hundreds and hundreds of million dollar run rates, it's got the best friends, the best restaurants in the country, and every restaurant that's on Providoor is like having Christmas week for a restaurant every single week," Wyatt said. "It's an incredibly humbling experience to be able to save not only a good idea, but to completely save the industry during the middle of a pandemic – and most importantly, to feed hungry Australians with the magic of a restaurant in their homes."

Wyatt was also proud to list some of the larger organisations Marketplacer has worked with. "We've got these businesses like Woolworths – it's the largest retail business in the Australian economy – and they've said, for exactly the reasons I spoke through – provide ease, convenience and choice, value in the customer. I can't buy enough things to put in my warehouse, I can't ship everything myself. They've said, 'I can grow'," he explained. "Imagine talking to a $90 billion retailer, and saying the only way we can grow is by doing a marketplace. Now that's a pretty humbling moment in life."

Among the company's recent projects, Wyatt noted ongoing partnerships with other major names and outlined a particular success with the iconic Australian airline, Qantas. "If you said to every single Australian, 'What is Qantas?' they know the brand, and it's very, very rare that you get to work with a 100 percent recall brand-based business in your life, and we're fortunate enough to do that," he said. "The problem we're solving for Qantas was an interesting one: they've got one of the best, if not the best, loyalty programmes for their customers in the world… They created this amazing business on the Qantas Shop where you could buy everything, but what ultimately happened is they couldn't scale it because they didn't have the expertise of marketplace technology behind it. But ultimately, the true partnership that we've been able to do with Qantas and scale is now a very, very wonderful success story for both of us."

Asked how others could get involved or take advantage of the marketplace boom, Wyatt encouraged interested parties to reach out. "We're very social people. If we can help in any way, and if it doesn't work out, that's completely fine, but we'd love to hear from you," he said.