CatchyMarket is a leading B2C platform active across many nations around the world. Its marketplace covers not only English-speaking countries, but also those countries that are not so well explored, such as Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, which include some of the richest territories in Europe.
CatchyMarket was founded in 2012 and is a joint effort between the German company, Stadtstil, the United States company, KT Group, and Norway’s e-commerce company, KT International. It brought a large investment to its start-up to build the infrastructure of the website.
By launching its sourcing department in 2013, CatchyMarket has included the most popular items on the market, with a wide range of categories and subcategories, in order to supply its customers with a large selection of products. By the end of the year, CatchyMarket quickly developed to become one of the major players on the market in 2013.
By 2014, its European locally registered users exceed over 100 million, with daily sales of over 2000 units across Europe. With an expanding merger that happened in 2014, the Italian e-commerce company, Cittastile, joined the group with 23.5 million dollars to obtain 13.48% of shares from KT International in the capital market. It brought its own local channels and supply chain to help CatchyMarket reach the Italian market. Not surprisingly, with such quick growth, after 8 months, Cittastile reached its target growth with a more than 80% increase in sales in the fashion clothing and shoes categories. This made the company confident, reinforcing its belief that its previous decision was correct. The products and services are welcomed by city consumers and have become popular among young people between the ages of 18-40. Cittastile’s development in Italy is also significant.
Google’s global influence has become widely established and therefore the B2C e-commerce platform has to affiliate its rules and methodology. Since 2014, online SEO and social media have become more and more important for growing traffic , and CatchyMarket has acknowledged that cutting edge website technology is critical for any website to succeed. In 2015, the company invested more than 3 million USD to update its website structure, which will make it better suited for SEO purposes in order to bring more organic traffic to the website.
The investment paid off after six months, traffic increased 460% according to the Google Analytic report on CatchyMarket. Clicks lead to more sales, and traffic has not stopped allowing the company to cultivate the market further. In 2015, the Spanish and Dutch marketplace, respectively Ciudadestilo and Stadstijl, opened up by launching another two sites alongside CatchyMarket.
Within the same business quarter, company management decided to introduce a new model for bringing more participants to the marketplace to increase the company’s competitive advantage. Company or individual sellers were given access to become a seller on CatchyMarket, and qualified profiles were introduced to sell on even more marketplaces than CatchyMarket could offer.
As the logistics service is another factor for ensuring that customers enjoy a satisfactory purchasing experience, at the request of a number of sellers, CatchyMarket further developed its own tracking system, whereby more than 500 local European logistics carriers, as well as international carriers, are connected on the marketplace. Sellers are able to use almost any carrier to fulfill orders, with valid tracking numbers on the account. This has been done as an instant function; even a single tracking movement can be synced from the logistics company back to the website. This was another milestone for the company achieved in 2016.
Even the return/refund process, a so-called RMA system, has been improved on the marketplace sites, allowing the customer to be able to reach the seller easily. Returns becomes easy to handle and the steps easy to follow, providing the entire steps necessary for ensuring that the customer’s experience is excellent. Effective communication can be made between buyer and seller.
CatchyMarket has provided an even fairer business environment to all sellers. Sellers can choose their own return period, including 14 days, 1 month, and 3 months, and their own delivery time, including 3-5 days, 5-7 days, 7-10 days. This information is featured on the front page under the fine print section that every customer can see beforehand. There is even a double check function which is unique and designed to reduce mistakes. Variants are chosen by customers in such a way to protect seller’s interests where a free returns service has to be covered by the seller.As CatchyMarket is offering tens of thousands of attractive items daily to millions of customers across Europe, it has great potential to soon become a future regional leader in the B2C marketplace e-commerce field. In particular, the number of sellers increased significantly in 2018, and its much welcomed. ‘free to join’ policy has attracted more and more sellers from Southeast Asia to join the platform; this has even resulted in some of the giant sellers from Amazon and eBay to become integrated.
