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Spreadshirt Expands Marketplace Presence with Rakuten (USA) Store

Spreadshirt Expands External Marketplace Presence with Rakuten (USA) Store

Marketplaces Key to Ecommerce Platform’s Growth Strategy

Spreadshirt, the ecommerce site which makes it easy to spread, share and sell ideas on merchandising, has opened an online store on Rakuten USA. The global marketplace is the third largest internet retailer in the world.

Spreadshirt CEO, Philip Rooke, explains, “Marketplaces are often the starting point for ecommerce, with people searching on their favourite shopping sites, rather than search engines, for the sort of products our partners sell. So expanding our presence on marketplaces is a key part of our growth strategy and more marketplaces will follow as we become a billion dollar, game-changing business.”

A presence on external marketplaces like Rakuten increase the visibility of Spreadshirt partner products and give users different routes to market. Some of the initial products, including a No Humans Before Coffee t-shirt can be seen on the site already. http://spreadshirt.shop.rakuten.com/

Spreadshirt is now active in seven external marketplaces, in addition to Rakuten USA, Spreadshirt products are available on: Amazon UK, US, Germany and France, plus eBay in the US and Germany. A recent Tech Trader survey revealed that 38.2% of respondents started their search an online marketplace, which were the most popular amongst the under 35s.[1]

Tino Liebich, Head of External Marketplaces at Spreadshirt adds, “This is a learning process for us as well. We note that the individual marketplaces have different orientations and address different audiences. To meet the needs of customers and the demands of the marketplace operator Rakuten.com, we initially start with a small, selected product offer. This assortment will be expanded successively.”

Rakuten offers more than 17 million products to more than 18 million customers on its USA platform.

About Spreadshirt

SPREAD IT WITH SPREADSHIRT: Ecommerce company, Spreadshirt, provides individuals, businesses and organisations with a platform for buying, selling and creating ideas. The global community of more than 70,000 sellers, including Newcastle Brown Ale, Rubik’s Cube, Thelwell and The Avengers is provided with more than 150 products and numerous points-of-sale. These include white label shops, Spreadshirt’s own and external marketplaces (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Rakuten), and individual fulfillment solutions via APIs and plug-ins (e.g., Shopify, Magento).

The company, founded in 2002, is active in 19 markets and 12 languages and operates five production sites; Germany, Poland, the USA and Brazil. All products are printed on-demand. In 2014, Spreadshirt hit global revenue of approximately £58 million and sent more than 3.3 million articles to more than 150 countries.

The Spreadshirt family also includes Yink, a provider of high volume, customised promotional textile printing.

[1] Tech Trader Daily. 25 Aug 15. http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/08/25/google-amazon-still-tops-says-baird-internet-survey/

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Philip Rooke .