In this current transitional phase (“The Rebirth of German Mail-Order?”), the e-commerce industry has an excellent chance to free itself from the former chains of the mail-order catalogue companies and now quickly establish modern trade and sales structures.
Surprisingly, Intershop might be the one to act as the critical catalyst and champion the modernisation of trade and commerce structures. Intershop has in February, largely unnoticed from the public, taken majority ownership (GE/EN) of TheBakery which is a startup out of Berlin with huge potential.
TheBakery seeks to break the rules of old sales structures and widely “virtualize” distribution - and in doing so enable a cornucopia of new cooperation and sales models:
In this manner, an arbitrary number of vendors can be linked into an arbitrary number of platforms without restrictions.
Naturally the data exchange works in all directions automatically over standard interfaces”, described Intershop’s Managing Director Henry Goettler.
TheBakery is backed by part of the former Product + Concept GmbH team, who amongst other things developed and operated for Quelle the virtual sales platform “Quelle Market”. Quelle Market was shut down almost a year ago despite a promising future, due to the inability to agree on a purchase price when P+C was going through insolvency.
TheBakery comes now (with perfect market timing) with a supplier-independent solution which fulfills many of Exciting Commerce’s prerequisites for a contemporary trade and sales structure:
- Flexible linkage of different manufacturers and suppliers to the in-house product line of the retailer.
- A uniform shopping cart via the complete integration of the sales mix into the retailer’s own shopping system (shop or portal).
- Furthermore, although TheBakery is run by Intershop, in principle any shopping system can be attached.
In the last years, countless suppliers such as Ebay Express, Electronicscout24, Neckermann, Otto and Quelle have struggled with proprietary sales platforms.
If TheBakery’s concept takes off, soon a lot of “Quelle Markets” and other virtual sales systems will spring up. Even product search engines and social shopping websites can use TheBakery solution to make sales.
We are observing the developments with great interest. Leading the pack is a well-known electronic goods organisation who plan to go online this year with TheBakery.
TheBakery will be giving a talk on the opportunities in product sourcing at the next Live Shopping Days conference in Berlin on January 28, 2010 (German language).
Editor’s note: A long thread of insightful comments can be found on Jochen Krisch’s original German language post. A serviceable auto-translation linked here.
Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
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