From local to global, established to aspiring, the wide variety of brands featured on TheMarket, one of New Zealand’s newest marketplaces, hold one thing in common: appeal to Kiwi shoppers.
TheMarket launched in August 2019 with 1,000+ brands and has been expanding rapidly ever since. Now, it already includes over 4,000 brands, making its ambitious goal to bring more than 10,000 of the most innovative, desirable and quality brands to a single platform even more achievable compared to one year ago.
Backed by the Warehouse Group, one of New Zealand’s largest retail groups, with 3.5 million active customers, TheMarket features:
- 2+ million products
- 12 million annual visitors to its website
- 2 strategically located fulfilment centres
- A mobile app
Key Advantages
TheMarket brings a curated shopping experience with a modern feel to consumers who savour shopping, prefer convenience and seek out quality products.
Brands-first philosophy: TheMarket’s focus on local, international and niche brands connects highly engaged buyers with products they love. The platform’s design makes discovering and new brands and revisiting known favourites simple and satisfying. Diverse search options and brands-first content keep branded options highly accessible and memorable for browsers and serious shoppers alike.
Local customer support: TheMarket utilises a distributed network of MarketPoints — local retail stores — that accept free returns from customers. This structure brings convenience to its customers while fostering the strength of the retail network within the Warehouse Group.
Strong growth potential: The forecast for e-commerce in New Zealand is one of burgeoning growth, especially in marketplaces. According to NZ Post, in 2019, the percentage of New Zealanders who shopped online increased to reach nearly 50% — a key milestone — and regular shoppers (those who completed more than 12 transactions a year) increased their spending to $106 per transaction on average. The same report found the industry in New Zealand experienced a 13% growth in online spend in 2019, with 20% growth in spending in the category of online clothing and footwear. When compared to statistics from the previous year, the growth of online shopping appears to come from expansion of activity and depth of spending in existing online shoppers as well as entry of new consumers into the realm of online purchasing.
A Unique Approach
As the 2020 winner of the Marketplace Branding Award from Retail Without Borders, TheMarket has taken a unique approach from the inception of its marketplace. With awareness that buyers can be inspired and make purchases at any time, any place, TheMarket offers a wide range of products and price points and delivers a pleasant and frictionless purchase to buyers regardless of device or origin point. The platform’s design incorporates contextual commerce, highlights trends, inspires audiences, builds followers and manages brand-centric content.
TheMarket’s team fosters awareness of brands, monitoring consumer trends and attitudes toward products and overall spending. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Zealand has fared better than most neighboring economies but a cautious outlook on consumer activity remains. Interest in e-commerce continues to surge, much as it has worldwide since the onset of the pandemic.
Successful Sellers on TheMarket
Top categories include fashion, footwear, kids and babies, toys, health and beauty, electronics, sports and outdoors. The consumer trends identified by TheMarket as experiencing growth in the current 2020 landscape include categories that fuel in-home occasions, at-home exercise, garden and DIY projects, working from home, apparel and affordable indulgences.
In general, sellers that achieve the most success on TheMarket tend to focus on bringing their customers:
- Great value
- Prompt and competitive delivery times
- A full range of products
- Retail events
TheMarket provides an attractive option for Rithum clients to expand global presence and capture opportunity in a growing market.
Interested in discovering more? Contact us at contact@rithum.com and one of our e-commerce specialists will get back to you!
