Catch Marketplace is an online retail platform that provides a diverse range of items, including fashion, electronics, household products, and more, frequently featuring reduced prices and special offers, making it a favored choice for online shoppers seeking cost-effective options.
If you’d like to start your own marketplace like Catch, 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 a marketplace SaaS. Go live, start selling, iterate.
Build vs Buy a marketplace?
Employing open-source has its benefits, such as full ownership and the freedom to adapt, but these come with their own costs. Developing a complete marketplace solution is an extensive and costly endeavor, often taking many months or years, as learned from multiple marketplace projects.
If you haven’t secured a significant amount of funding, it’s generally more sensible to adopt a pre-built, all-encompassing marketplace solution like Vendo, as recommended by an expert with years of experience in billing for marketplace development.
Back to the Catch marketplace case study
Catch, an Australian online shopping site, has become a major player in the e-commerce world. It all started in 2006 when Gabby and Hezi Leibovich began “Catch of the Day,” a daily deals website.
Their idea was simple but effective: they offered a lot of one item at really low prices for a short time. This idea, inspired by US sites like Woot, combined good prices with the idea that you had to act fast, and Australians loved it. This strategy earned the Leibovich brothers awards and boosted their sales to $250 million, making Catch one of the top websites in Australia.
In 2019, Catch reached a big milestone when Wesfarmers bought it for $230 million. This showed how Catch had grown, thanks in part to its innovative way of running a marketplace.
By 2018-19, Catch’s ads made more than $155 million in sales on their own. They used a smart, automated way to promote their almost 3 million products. This helped Catch keep up with what customers wanted and made it a leader in the Australian market.
Catch’s success fits into the bigger story of online shopping growing in recent years, especially in 2020. E-commerce sales went up by 44%, the most in 20 years. Marketplaces like Catch did even better, with an 81% increase in how much stuff they sold.
This happened because of the pandemic, which made people shop online more. Marketplaces did a good job of finding new sellers and adding new things to buy. They also kept their customers happy, which was a big part of their success.
How to emulate Catch marketplace success?
If you would like to emulate the Catch success somewhat, please consider launching your marketplace within weeks not months, testing the fit between your product catalog strategy and your audience needs, iterating your customer acquisition methods based on real-life results.
Test the market, before you invest into building it yourself.
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?
