The Platform Chronicles: 10 Questions with Jim Stirewalt, President, Marketplacer US
On his plans to become the most trusted marketplace platform in North America
Welcome to The Platform Chronicles, a series designed to introduce readers to some of the most innovative Salesforce customers, partners, and employees.
This issue introduces Jim Stirewalt, President of Marketplacer US. Jim is a market maker with over 25 years of experience in building and executing go-to-market strategies for small to very large enterprises. Jim became President of Marketplacer US in February 2021, following his role of Global Chief Revenue Officer for the Enterprise Content Management provider, CoreMedia Corp.
Prior to CoreMedia, Jim held positions as head of Worldwide Sales for IBM Watson Customer Engagement; as Vice President of the Fashion & Retail business at SAP where he served for six years. Previous to his executive roles leading software and technology businesses, Jim had a lengthy entrepreneurial career in advertising, branding and graphic design, which included starting and selling an award-winning advertising agency.
Fun fact: Jim, with his son Jack are avid gearheads and love buying and fixing up old sports cars, including the recent purchase of a 1991 BMW 318is, of which only 52 remain in existence. Together, Jim and Jack won the car in an auction, flew to Austin to pick it up and “road tripped” it back 1000 miles to the family home in Knoxville, TN.
10 Questions for Jim
The following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Question #1
Jim, when we first talked a few weeks ago, you had mentioned that you were teaming with Salesforce on a series of new deals. One of those new customers was SHOP CIRCULATE, which is headed by Sean “Diddy” Combs. What can you tell us about your newest customer?
This is an important mission and one we are honored to be part of. SHOP CIRCULATE is a curated digital marketplace that allows consumers to discover and buy products exclusively created and sold by Black entrepreneurs. It’s designed to provide Black businesses with a platform to reach global audiences and empowers consumers to shop the world’s best Black-owned brands. The plan is to launch later this year, featuring an expansive list of businesses across categories — from beauty, fashion, and art, to health, wellness, and home.
This is a collaboration between Sean Combs’ Combs Enterprises, Salesforce, Deloitte Digital, and Marketplacer, who will be powering the marketplace to connect buyers and sellers at scale.
(Note: If you want to know more about SHOP CIRCULATE, here is a great write-up in REVOLT about the initiative.)
Question #2
Marketplacer’s roots trace back to BikeExchange.com which the company’s founders started back around 2007. Over time you pivoted from selling bikes to creating a platform for the sales of all kinds of goods and services. How did that happen?
As with a lot of billion dollar ideas, it started with answering a personal need. After 10 years of running BikeExchange on proprietary software that we built, and scaling it with all of our marketplace learnings, we spun Marketplacer out. We leveraged our technology expertise on the needs of marketplace suppliers and operators to refine our platform offering. We paired that with our extensive marketplace knowledge, creating two of our defining company pillars of best of breed marketplace technology and partnership. We don’t just build software. We help companies build, grow, and scale their marketplaces.
Question #3
Jim, what made you decide to join Marketplacer?
I knew about Marketplacer from my time running global sales at IBM Customer Experience — that led me to spending quite a bit of time in Australia. I was always fascinated with the company and the founder’s story that goes back to the BikeExchange legacy. Fast forward a couple years when I was introduced by a colleague to CEO and Founder, Jason Wyatt.
Once I learned more about Marketplacer, its technology, vision and plans to make a dramatic move into the U.S., I was more than intrigued. Now five months in I can attest that this is for real. This is the right bet to make. Marketplacer is in a profound position to serve the needs of the rapidly expanding marketplace market and help companies develop revenue streams they didn’t even know they could own. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
It’s an exciting time to be at the forefront of this emerging space. In a nutshell, Marketplacer enables you to sell stuff you don’t own by turning any website into an owned marketplace that drives transformational shifts in revenue. We aren’t talking about selling on Amazon or Alibaba. We are talking about turning YOUR site into a marketplace, something we’re seeing a wide range of companies wanting to explore as part of overall ecommerce strategies.
Question #4
Marketplacer is on a roll. At last count, you’re powering close to 100 marketplaces supporting 25,000 suppliers in 10 countries. What’s your ‘secret sauce?’
If I had to boil it down to one word: flexibility. Flexibility to create the type of marketplace you want into whatever current tech stack you have. Flexibility to on-ramp a marketplace and test out the ROI without a massive upfront investment. Flexibility to work alongside you, your team, and your SI to ensure success. Flexibility to work with large communities like FishBrain, the largest fishing community in the world and a cool app, or complex business models like Bob Jane tires. Flexibility is at the core of what we do.
Question #5
In mid-April, you announced Salesforce Ventures as your newest investor. What kind of impact has this had on your business?
The power of Salesforce is incredible — both working with Salesforce Ventures and the team at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This relationship has validated the strength and innovation of our technology and catapulted us into the U.S. market. The SHOP CIRCULATE news was widely picked up by Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Chain Store Age, Women’s Wear Daily, Retail Info Systems News, and Retail Dive, to name a few, generating millions of views of the story. We see this as only the beginning of what Marketplacer and Salesforce are going to accomplish together.
Question #6
I know some e-commerce projects tend to have long implementation times. How long does it take to get up and running with Marketplacer?
The days of massive implementations where you don’t see an ROI for a year are long gone. SurfStitch, a great joint Salesforce and Marketplacer customer, launched in just 40 days with their marketplace. And that’s an average implementation timeline for a customer like that.
Our unique combination of expertise, partnership, and technology, affords our customers the opportunity to find what’s best for them in a manageable crawl-walk-run approach, something companies are increasingly asking for as an alternative to an all-or-nothing mentality that prevails in the industry. Our main goal is to help customers on-ramp a marketplace strategy where they can confirm the ROI with a short time to value then continue to build and scale their marketplace operations, reducing risk and upfront overhead. SurfStitch is an example of that in action.
Question #7
The SurfStitch story is a good one. Can you tell us more about the customer’s goals and success to date?
SurfStitch is a great story that clearly demonstrates the power of Salesforce Commerce Cloud + Marketplacer. SurfStitch, a leading surf apparel retailer with access to a large audience of customers, realized they could be offering other adjacent products that they don’t care to own and manage inventory.
A range extension play led to SurfStitch offering surfboards on its Salesforce Commerce Cloud-powered website by adding Marketplace functionality. The cool thing is, it’s so transparent to the shopper they don’t even know they are shopping on a marketplace since it’s embedded right into their Salesforce Commerce Cloud experience. It’s simple. It’s easy. And it drove 300% increase in new vendors onboarded to SurfStitch in just three months — with endless capability to add more.
Question #8
While the relationship with Salesforce is relatively new, are you using or planning to use Salesforce products like MuleSoft or Tableau?
We currently use Tableau to power our customer reporting! When we think about the impact of Marketplacer across the Salesforce ecosystem, we look more at Service Cloud and Sales Cloud first. Salesforce 360 focuses on knowing the customer across all touch-points. Marketplacer drives more sales and more consumption on both of these platforms. There are a lot of integration opportunities within the Salesforce suite of products and I think you’ll see us continue to deepen the relationship.
Question #9
Salesforce is very committed to creating solutions for industries, including some new micro-verticals. What are you seeing in terms of industry deman?
Marketplacer has its eye on the global market and we’ve got a plan in place to do it. Between market and partner demand, we’ve already got a full plate. There is tremendous opportunity in verticals like Apparel, Grocery, B2B, Automotive, and celebrity-backed marketplaces. We already have a lot of demand from companies in this area and are laser-focused on getting them to market.
Question #10
Jim, last question … What are your plans for North America over the next 12–18 months?
Our plans are to become the most trusted marketplace platform in North America. How we’re doing that is by recruiting top talent, creating a customer and partner-centric culture and embracing a process that isn’t about selling software, but rather solving customer problems at scale. The fact that we have been able to recruit the likes of Lindsay Moore and Mike Herder into key leadership positions speaks volumes. We’ve also attracted heavy hitter talent across our quickly growing US team in the areas of Customer Success, Sales, Solution Engineering and Marketing.
Our plans also include delivering big on Salesforce Ventures investment and bet on Marketplacer. We’re doing this by putting massive focus on developing a deeply collaborative relationship with the Salesforce go-to-market teams and leadership. What we’re doing together on SHOP CIRCULATE is a type of joint win we can replicate.
Jim, thank you for your time!
About Marketplacer: Marketplacer is a global technology Software as a Service (SaaS) platform equipped with all the tools and functionality needed to build a successful and scalable online marketplace, at speed. To date, Marketplacer has helped over 95 businesses build and deploy their very own successful marketplace strategies and connected over 25,000 businesses worldwide. The Marketplacer platform exists to make growth simple, from implementing marketplace strategies such as shipment from drop-ship sellers, adding new categories or third-party range extension, through to consolidating markets and rolling out modern revenue models such as recurring memberships that allow businesses to grow faster and beyond the constraints of capital inventory.
Born and bred from the award-winning BikeExchange, the biggest online marketplace for anything and everything bike, founders Jason Wyatt and Sam Salter saw the opportunity to license the online software platform and apply it to new marketplaces. Marketplacer is responsible for the creation of online eCommerce solutions and business transformations of companies around the world. Visit www.marketplacer.com for more information.
