Mega Marketplaces. Envato made Andreessen Horowitz’s Marketplace 100 for the third year in a row. At #38, Envato is the only Aussie company to make the list of the largest private consumer-facing marketplaces.
As a result of the “covid bounceback,” Ticketing/Experience, Food & Beverage, and Education saw the most new entrants on the A16Z list. It’s also a trend that Aussie homewares retail marketplace MyDeal spotted – recently launching a new activities and experiences marketplace, Amazed.com.
NFTs were “a huge and important part slovenia cell phone database of the consumer marketplace story”, exploding in 2021. Locally, the AFL wants in on that action and has partnered with Animoca Brands to launch a new NFT marketplace featuring historic football moments and exclusive player access.
Fail Fast. Fast, the one-stop checkout startup valued last year at over US$500m, sped to collapse earlier this month. Founded by Aussie Domm Holland (now based in SF), Fast originally set out to raise a round at a valuation of more than US$1bn, but investors soon balked at its metrics – Fast was burning through a whopping US$10m/month and producing less than $100k revenue per month. Here’s some more detail on what went down and first-hand insight into life at Fast.
Hmm we’ll just leave this TEDx Talk on leadership here (the tl;dr version):
Trouble in paradise. Global hotel booking site Trivago has been fined $45m for misleading customers that it provided “the best price” for rooms. Rather than showing the best deal, Trivago promoted hotels that paid it the biggest fees and often compared the price of a standard room against a luxury room at the same hotel to make it appear a “discount” was being applied.
Sizzlin’ Bunnings once again took out the top spot at Power Retail’s annual online retail awards. Bunnings was also the third Most Trusted Brand according to Roy Morgan in 2021.
Heads will roll
But it’s not all rosy in the Wesfarmers HQ. Despite the boom in online shopping, Catch.com’s EBIT loss grew to $44m in H1’22 and total revenue fell 4.3% to $315m. CEO Peter Sauerborn will resign and Wesfarmers’ data and digital head, Nicole Sheffield, will take over. Sauerborn had previously spent 10 years growing Amazon Marketplace – a place that had a very different culture to Catch in its pre-Wesfarmers heyday. In other Catch news, it also launched its first NSW fulfilment centre this week.
Firsts for Amazon. Amazon opened a robotics fulfilment centre in Western Sydney. The first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, the warehouse is the size of around 24 rugby fields and can house up to 20 million items. Meanwhile in the U.S., Amazon’s New York warehouse workers who are unhappy with working conditions voted to form a union – the first in Amazon’s 27-year history.