How Intershop Wants To Lead the Trade Revolution
Nov 15th, 2009 by admin
In this current transitional phase (The Rebirth of German Mail-Order?), the e-commerce industry has an excellent chance to free itself from the former chains of the mail-order catalogue companies and now quickly establish modern trade and sales structures.
Picture of TheBakery: How Intershop Wants To Lead the Trade Revolution [source:excitingcommerce.com]
Surprisingly, Intershop might be the one to act as the critical catalyst and champion the modernisation of trade and commerce structures. Intershop has in February, largely unnoticed from the public, taken majority ownership (GE/EN) of TheBakery which is a startup out of Berlin with huge potential.
TheBakery seeks to break the rules of old sales structures and widely virtualize distribution - and in doing so enable a cornucopia of new cooperation and sales models:
With our standard solutions it will in the future be possible to augment the product palette of an online shop with goods from suppliers or third party vendors in a virtual way.
In this manner, an arbitrary number of vendors can be linked into an arbitrary number of platforms without restrictions.
Naturally the data exchange works in all directions automatically over standard interfaces, described Intershops Managing Director Henry Goettler.
TheBakery is backed by part of the former Product + Concept GmbH team, who amongst other things developed and operated for Quelle the virtual sales platform Quelle Market. Quelle Market was shut down almost a year ago despite a promising future, due to the inability to agree on a purchase price when P+C was going through insolvency.
TheBakery comes now (with perfect market timing) with a supplier-independent solution which fulfills many of Exciting Commerces prerequisites for a contemporary trade and sales structure:
Flexible linkage of different manufacturers and suppliers to the in-house product line of the retailer. A uniform shopping cart via the complete integration of the sales mix into the retailers own shopping system (shop or portal). Furthermore, although TheBakery is run by Intershop, in principle any shopping system can be attached.
In the last years, countless suppliers such as Ebay Express, Electronicscout24, Neckermann, Otto and Quelle have struggled with proprietary sales platforms.
If TheBakerys concept takes off, soon a lot of Quelle Markets and other virtual sales systems will spring up. Even product search engines and social shopping websites can use TheBakery solution to make sales.
We are observing the developments with great interest. Leading the pack is a well-known electronic goods organisation who plan to go online this year with TheBakery.
TheBakery will be giving a talk on the opportunities in product sourcing at the next Live Shopping Days conference in Berlin on January 28, 2010 (German language).
Editors note: A long thread of insightful comments can be found on Jochen Krischs original German language post. A serviceable auto-translation linked here.
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.[source:excitingcommerce.com]
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