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About
Established with a clear vision—to support local Kiwi sellers and Kiwi shoppers—Buy Kiwi partnered with UC Marketplace to create a thriving multi-vendor marketplace that strengthens New Zealand’s economy, empowers local businesses, and connects communities through trusted online commerce.
Introduction
Based in New Zealand, Buy Kiwi wanted to create a way whereby local communities can strengthen the New Zealand economy, minimise the environmental impact of moving goods globally, and reduce the dollars sent overseas. By creating a trustworthy multi-vendor eCommerce platform, Buy Kiwi can begin to tackle the “imported inflation” one step at a time.
Buy Kiwi aims to put New Zealand sellers on the global map. By creating a marketplace, local New Zealand sellers can expand their reach to overseas consumers. In year one of Buy Kiwi’s operations, they had a vendor pool of 500 sellers and a catalog of over 140,000 SKUs.
The problem
Buy Kiwi was built on a premise of helping. They identified an opportunity in the New Zealand market to create a marketplace that helps local buyers and sellers connect. Buy Kiwi wanted to provide a solution that gave consumers the confidence of supporting local.
Buy Kiwi was after a quick implementation for the MVP, leveraging UC Marketplace’s extensive out-of-the-box capabilities for a Multi-Vendor B2C Marketplace. UC Marketplace’s fast connectivity of eCommerce platforms via Fuse, enabling a three-way sync for Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento 2 allowed Buy Kiwi to launch with a bang.
By engaging with UC Marketplace as a technology partner, Buy Kiwi had a reduction in cost for go-to-market, accelerated timeframes, and a PaaS model which allows for future proof evolution to anticipate market demands.
The solution
Buy Kiwi were after an initial product that could provide them with out-of-the-box capabilities to operate a fully functional marketplace. Buy Kiwi was transparent in its strategic approach for acquiring many sellers in their first year of operations.
UC Marketplace and Buy Kiwi collaborated to optimize their seller onboarding process and ensure sellers were fully operational within 3-5 days. UC Marketplace extended Fuse capabilities to allow for more granular import of product attributes, promotional pricing, brands, and ease of copying all options to attributes, copying mapping, and ultimately, place more control with both the marketplace operator and the vendor.
Further to the improvements completed in vendor onboarding, Buy Kiwi’s new focus is to introduce Service Provider sellers. While it is a small subset of sellers at this stage, UC Marketplace introduced a service provider discovery/filter capability on Buy Kiwis Service Provider search page to enhance the customer experience and aid in search and discovery. From a customer perspective, UC Marketplace also extended its payment method capabilities to fully support AfterPay & Link to ensure it is compatible with UC Marketplace’s marketplace commercials operations. Once these two payment methods became available to customers, it ultimately increased their conversion rate by 7%.
The outcome
By leveraging UC Marketplace’s out-of-the-box capabilities for B2C, and applying best practices for UX/UI, Buy Kiwi led an incredibly successful Year 1 of operations. Buy Kiwi has now onboarded 500 vendors and contains a catalog of over 140,000 SKUs.
Potential sellers continue to be thoroughly interested and engaged with Buy Kiwi, and for minimal cost and effort they can gain significant brand exposure to a customer database of over 10,000.
Buy Kiwi continue to have significant growth month-on-month
50% increase in revenue month on month
28% increase in cart size
Buy Kiwi would like to begin to emphasise their service provider offerings combined with an improved customer user experience. UC Marketplace continues to work closely alongside Buy Kiwi to ensure deliverables are aligned, and the marketplace undergoes perpetual improvements to keep up with customer demands.
