Ethi — Online Marketplace Using Syncio to Sync Multiple Shopify Stores and Thousands of Products
Background
Entrepreneur Jimmy Zhong had a vision to build a one-stop shop for ethical and sustainable fashion. Ethi curates brands through its EMPATHY values, which stands for Environment, Material Sustainability, People, Animal-free, Transparency, Handmade, and Your local. At least one of the values must be met in order for a brand to sell on Ethi.
Today, Ethi is one of the largest ethical fashion marketplaces in the world, with 50 brands and over 2000 products to shop for, ranging from clothing, accessories, skincare, and more.
This is harder than it seems!
When Jimmy first started Ethi, he began contacting as many brands as possible to sell on Ethi and soon enough had his first five brands agree to sell on Ethi. Jimmy was ecstatic. However, the excitement was short lived when he realised that adding all the inventory across five brands was extremely time consuming, error laden, and tedious.
Curious to know how long it took to upload a new collection of about 30 products, once everything was updated from the spreadsheet, with all the images loaded, it took Jimmy just over an hour to finish! This was for just one collection from one brand too! With 5 brands, a total of 150 products updated would take 5 hours. If Jimmy’s time was worth $50/hour, that would be $250 of effort on updating 150 products.
What’s more, it was also time consuming to update inventory as brands would send through their inventory updates over a period of weeks. This increased the risk of selling out of stock products, resulting in a poor customer experience.
Automating inventory management
Jimmy got tired of updating inventory and the more brands that he got on Ethi, the more time was spent on inventory. This was not ideal, as time spent on inventory took time away from growing Ethi.
Jimmy needed a simple real-time inventory syncing solution that was not bloated with features, he just needed a way to copy products across with a click that would then be real-time synced. He also identified Shopify as the perfect platform to build an integration app on first, with more than 60% of the brands he was speaking to on Shopify.
So the Ethi team was challenged to build Syncio, and soon enough had a working version of it up and running. The results were far beyond what Jimmy had imagined, through Syncio he was able to onboard 25 brands in a month. Brands found it easy to connect their inventory to Ethi and for Ethi it meant that products could be uploaded to the website in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
The rate of out-of-stock sales dropped dramatically, and eventually Jimmy was also able to save time on sending manual purchase orders via email to brands as well. Syncio is now able to push Ethi orders directly to the brands, so now brands can manage all their orders centrally rather than create manual orders. Another time saving feature!
Benefits
Inventory used to be a significant hurdle for Ethi to grow into a one-stop shop for ethical and sustainable fashion. Now through Syncio, inventory has become a major advantage for Ethi, growing into one of the largest online destinations for ethical fashion in the world.
With each brand connected, Ethi also offers a new channel for that brand to gain exposure to, bringing in new customers. The more brands, the bigger the network effect. This offers a fantastic marketing opportunity for Ethi and the brands. For Ethi, each brand brings an amazing story and products which makes for great marketing content. For the brand, Ethi offers a new community that can be introduced to its story and products.
For Jimmy, he now no longer needs to spend hours uploading and updating products on Ethi. He can focus on marketing and making sure that the brands and customers are having a great experience on Ethi. After the initial installation, the brands don’t have to spend any other effort or time selling on Ethi — aside from fulfil orders sent from Ethi!
Tips on building a marketplace with a large inventory
- Growing the number of brands and products for your store is great but it is even more critical to maintain a great relationship with the stores that you are syncing products from. Trust is key to a successful partnership.
- Have a marketing and distribution plan around how you intend to promote the brand and make sure that visitors can easily search and discover their brand and products.
- Save a ton of time and stress by using a real-time inventory sync app like Syncio. This will make the experience seamless for the brand.
- When sending an invitation for another store to sync, help them through the onboarding experience as much as possible so that you are on the same page with them. You can also refer them to Syncio’s self-help guide or to speak to the Syncio team for help.
P.S. Yes I wrote about myself — an interesting experience writing about yourself in third person!
Find out more about Ethi.
Could enjoy the same value that Ethi has enjoyed with Syncio? Start a free trial today!
