Even though e-commerce in the Czech Republic and around the world is experiencing a weaker year this year due to general price increases and a drop in customer demand, online marketplaces are growing. And six percent faster year-on-year than e-commerce itself. This trend is also confirmed by data from the company Mailstep, which helps e-shops with fulfillment - i.e. with all services related to the packaging of goods or logistics.
"We see that online marketplaces are increasingly important for e-shops. And thanks to the BaseLinker platform, we can now help our customers with logistics for up to 75 new online marketplaces across Europe. They can thus expand more easily, and we will solve the entire process from transportation to the possible return of goods for them even outside the borders of the Czech Republic," explains Libor Hudeček, CEO of Mailstep.
According to Radek Klouda, CEO of BaseLinker for the Czechia and Slovakia, entry barriers and conditions for listing on marketplaces are generally easing. Therefore, e-shops more often decide to sell outside the Czech Republic. Clients mainly discover Western Europe and America, then the region of Central and Eastern Europe, thanks to, among other things, the ability to deliver goods the very next day and the better availability of fulfillment services offered by Mailstep, for example.
"Today, there are also very fast, simple and cheap ways to connect e-shops to marketplaces, as well as to solve for them the complete listing and translations of products, orders, warehouses, invoicing or to outsource the entire logistics. Therefore, I see the connection of BaseLinker with Mailstep as a huge added value for our expanding clients," adds Radek Klouda.
The field of fulfillment is gaining importance due to the long-term e-commerce boom, and the current cooling of the market does not change that. For smaller internet sellers, fulfillment will help solve all logistics services, and the owner or operator of the e-shop can concentrate on other business-related activities.
"The great boom in e-commerce has also set a new bar for consumer expectations, when we are already used to next-day delivery. The fast shipping guarantee of the big players has set a precedent for the rest of the industry, but not everyone can keep up. Many smaller traders are therefore naturally looking for ways to eliminate time-consuming tasks such as logistics," says Lukáš Hudeček.
More and more e-shops, even the smallest ones, are therefore using fulfillment services, whose influence on the e-commerce business itself is growing year by year. This is evidenced by the success of Mailstep, which expects to increase last year's sales of half a billion by tens of percent this year.
