TheBakery: How Intershop intends to revolutionize the retail industry

In the present phase of upheaval the e-commerce industry has the chance to completely get rid of obsolete mail order structures that have been maintained by catalog retailers so far and rapidly establish modern retail and distribution structures.

And of all things, Intershop may become the driving force in this matter as an important catalyst for next generation trading. In February 2009 and largely unnoticed by the public Intershop invested in a majority share of TheBakery, which is a German start-up company with disruptive potential.

TheBakery aims high at breaking up traditional distribution structures and extensively establishing a virtual distribution of goods to allow for a wealth of innovative co-operation and distribution models. 

"In the future, our standard solutions will allow for virtually incorporating the product lines of suppliers or third-party vendors into the range of products offered in an online shop and selling them in addition to own products.

There will be no constraints, since an unlimited number of suppliers can be integrated into an unlimited number of platforms. Of course, the data transfer will work automatically in all directions via standard interfaces." states Henry Goettler, Member of the Board of Management."

Behind TheBakery is a part of the former Product + Concept-team, who for example developed and operated the virtual “Quelle Market” platform for the Quelle company. Despite a promising future, the “Quelle Market” platform was shut down almost one year ago, because a purchase price couldn’t be agreed upon during P+C’s insolvency.

Now at the best time TheBakery puts a vendor-independent solution on the market, meeting many exciting commerce demands for contemporary retail and distribution structures:

• Flexible connection of different manufacturers and suppliers with vendor-specific assortments.

• Standardized shopping basket by integrating the entire assortment into existing shopping-systems (shop or portal)

• Although powered by Intershop, TheBakery can be connected to any existing shopping-system.

During the past years many retailing sites have been struggling with proprietary sales platforms from Ebay Express to Electronicscout24 and even Neckermann, Otto and Quelle.

If this concept works, TheBakery will bring drop shipment to a new level and plenty of "Quelle Markets" and other virtual sales systems will spring up like mushrooms in the near future. Even comparison engines and social shopping sites may use TheBakery to sell products all by themselves without difficulty.

We will be keeping an eye on this development with great interest. At first a well known electronic group is said to go live with TheBakery already within this year. 

Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch

Comments

[Curious]

this sounds interesting.but if this becomes a standard platform than there won't be too much competitive differentiation left between the various ecommerce portals utilizing this service. the only way they would be able to compete would be by lowering prices.

And how much different is this than social shopping sites like zlio, who allow anyone to create their own shop, if we leave the backend part aside.

So the question comes down to, whether this kind of service will make the ecommerce market much more competitive this reducing margins? Will the market really adopt this?

And what is their revenue model? Is it based on revenue sharing or subscription?