Kidstuff marketplace case study: book a demo to start yours
Kidstuff is a retail outlet and e-commerce platform known for its diverse range of children’s toys, games, and educational products, catering to various age groups and developmental needs.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Kidstuff, you’re facing a buy vs build decision. So before you decide to build it in-house on top of Spree open-source, consider using Vendo, which is the feature-rich Enterprise Edition cutting your time-to-market to a few weeks.
Build vs Buy a marketplace?
Open-source usage offers numerous advantages, like complete control and development versatility, but these come with significant financial costs. The process of developing a complete marketplace solution is lengthy and expensive, often requiring months or years. This has been our takeaway from several marketplace projects.
If you haven’t acquired substantial funding, you’re likely to find more value in an off-the-shelf, comprehensive marketplace solution like Vendo, advice from someone who has a long history of billing for marketplace development work.
Back to the Kidstuff marketplace case study
The Kidstuff marketplace, which started in the 1970s as part of EA Carey’s catalog business, has changed a lot over the years to adapt to market changes and new technology. At first, they expanded by buying catalogs from Natural Baby and Perfectly Safe, creating Jeannie’s Kids Club, which later became Kidstuff.
When the internet became popular, Kidstuff moved their business online, which worked well for a long time, but then sales started to go down. To fix this, the manager of Kidstuff’s parent company, Zenvesco, decided to sell products on big online sites like eBay, Amazon, and Walmart, but this made it harder to keep track of their inventory.
Kidstuff’s turning point happened in 2015 when they partnered with SellerActive. SellerActive’s solutions, like connecting to different online sites and helping with inventory, made a big difference.
One useful feature was bundling, which helped manage inventory when they sold multiple items together. Thanks to SellerActive’s systems, Kidstuff grew a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic without needing to hire a lot more people.
On the other hand, Kidizen, a marketplace for used children’s items, took a different approach to growing their marketplace. They wanted to make money by letting sellers pay for more visibility on their platform, but they didn’t have the resources to do it themselves.
So, they partnered with Kevel to add promoted listings, which improved seller visibility and the user experience. This way, they could make money without needing to do a lot more work as more people came to their site and more advertisers joined.
How to emulate kidstuff marketplace success?
Aiming for Kidstuff-like success, consider starting your marketplace soon, ideally within weeks, not months. Explore how your product range fits with what your customers need and keep tweaking your customer acquisition techniques based on real findings.
It’s smart to test the market before fully investing in its creation.
Here’s what you’d be getting with a Vendo free trial:
- Book a marketplace demo call: We’ll set up your demo marketplace and populate it with products, so you could give it a try and start selling in 14 days
- Customize your Storefront: Use the drag & drop page builder or custom CSS
- Onboard Brands: Invite your brands or choose brands from our catalog
- Select Products: Curate products and collections manually or automate it
- Embed products: Make your content, newsletters, social media shoppable
- Get Paid: Get paid as soon as products are shipped by the brands
- End-to-end automation: Brands sync, fulfillment, payouts, invoicing, taxes
When you’ve tried all that and it works, start thinking about building your own, custom-made marketplace project based on Spree Commerce. First, by decoupling the storefront and going headless with Vendo marketplace API, and later with your own backend, if you decide you really need it. Just lift and shift the storefront.
Nobody has to know what’s under the hood, right?
