You founded Omnyfy in 2017. What inspired you to start the business?

I lived and worked in Shanghai during the time of the e-commerce boom, with marketplaces such as Taobao, Tmall and Tencent just starting up. I saw the opportunity and scale that marketplaces brought to online retail and wanted to bring this capability to a platform solution that any organisation could use to create their own marketplace.

I founded Omnyfy on the back of a marketplace concept built in conjunction with Australia Post back in 2017. And that concept is still in use today, empowering the organisation to streamline procurement by its LPOs (Licensed Post Offices). That idea – to make it easy for individuals and companies to purchase from multiple vendors in a single transaction – was at the core of Omnyfy. Marketplace commerce at the time was still nascent, with most platforms being relatively new to the market and quite simple in their functionality. We set out to build a platform that was able to support complex transactions, be completely customisable to suit every customer’s need and be fast to market.

Tell us more about the businesses you work with.

We have scaled up our customer base significantly over the last five years, and Australia Post, our founding client, continues to use our platform to service its marketplace needs. We have customers in 13 countries and 15 industry verticals, including fashion and health care and wellness, and they work with us across business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketplaces.

These customers include Fortune 500 companies and large enterprises that are adopting multi-vendor commerce to extend existing business models and small to medium businesses, including those that want to enable third parties to sell products alongside them.

We also work with entrepreneurs to create marketplaces in spaces such as homewares, fashion, software, wine and spirits, craft beer, and vintage and designer clothing. If our client can conceptualise a marketplace, we can help them bring it to life.

What challenges do these businesses face when setting up a marketplace, and how do you address those?

There are a lot of challenges when creating a marketplace. The biggest is securing sellers, and a large part of this is making it easy to onboard them so they can bring their products to the table. The next step is to get sellers selling and dealing with those sales. You have to manage orders across multiple vendors, including fulfilment management, returns management, and more. Then there’s payment. How do you take payment from a customer and make it as easy as possible for a marketplace to distribute those payments efficiently across different sellers without placing too much of a financial load on them?

We have a streamlined, highly customisable method of onboarding vendors, including enabling marketplaces to request additional questions from vendors, to determine whether they meet qualification parameters, and then activating the relevant approvals and workflows. Connecting catalogues to marketplaces is another challenge, and our in-house technology, Omnyfy Fuse, enables marketplace operators to seamlessly add vendors’ catalogues from their e-commerce stores. We integrate with eight of the top 10 most popular e-commerce platforms today and are continuously adding new commerce platforms and aggregators, which allows our customers to rapidly grow the number of vendors selling with them. Fuse also enables vendors to receive orders directly into their e-commerce platform and send through shipment details once fulfilled, making it extremely easy to integrate large numbers of sellers quickly.

We are also adding new capabilities to enable vendors coming onto marketplaces with Omnyfy to onboard quickly and sell across multiple marketplaces. This will open up opportunities with online retailers with existing e-commerce stores that want to have other sellers sell alongside them.

How important is an effective payment solution to your offering?

Marketplace payments are complicated because you need to handle pay-in from customers, calculate commissions, and handle disbursements. We looked at several providers when we went to market, and Stripe stood out to us as ticking all the boxes of what we were trying to achieve.

We built our Stripe payments integration, and we now have the ability to transfer funds to sellers on marketplaces without any offline payment processes. Vendors also have a very streamlined flow that covers ”KYC – know your customer” and “KYB – know your business” requirements, which are crucial to governance, as well as anti-money-laundering checks. Stripe helps us to easily meet these required standards for payments, enabling us to create a flow-through value proposition for our marketplace owners. With Omnyfy, our clients get everything out of the box.

Stripe also gives us the ability to power complex B2B payment transaction types, including terms-based payments, organisation-level invoicing with order approval workflows, crucial for Procure2Pay transactions in large-scale B2B buying.

How important is your payment solution to your international expansion?

As a global payment solution, Stripe enables us to deploy marketplaces in any of the countries supported by Stripe, allowing us to implement solutions easily into countries such as Thailand, across Europe, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Middle East. We are in 13 countries, and Stripe powers us in all of them. Another benefit of Stripe is bringing in local payment methods in places such as Thailand, where customers can use PromptPay, a local payments service that has millions of users, and if you don’t have that capability, you’re losing out on a large customer base.

What are some of the key marketplace trends you are experiencing, and how well are you positioned to address them?

Marketplace and dropshipping are the two fastest-growing segments of e-commerce globally. We see huge growth potential in dropshipping, as businesses will need technology like ours to enable it, not just with dropshippers but with individual brands and resellers. The second pillar of growth we are seeing is the shift of business-to-business commerce to marketplace commerce, and we’re seeing major online retailers, global distributors and wholesale business-to-business organisations gravitate towards multi-vendor commerce and marketplaces. This is how they can expand their range and tap in to their existing customer base to sell them more, and they can sell without having to stock those products themselves. We’re well positioned not just for the business-to-consumer marketplace but also for more complex business-to-business commerce such as project procurement, PunchOut enablement, terms purchases, multi-organisation procurement solutions and cross-opco procurement.

We are also seeing marketplaces evolve. For example, we are working with a health care marketplace provider targeting the highly fragmented aged-care sector. This marketplace is putting in place a solution to help aged-care operators streamline and adopt a collective approach to procurement. Hence, we’re seeing these new ideas around what marketplaces mean, and this comes back to the importance of payment and treasury. As the size of the marketplaces grows, the need to streamline the purchasing process and ensure payments and tax calculations are accurate increases in importance as well. That is where our partnership with Stripe is so important – it gives us the tools and ability to walk in the door to marketplaces and say, ”We can solve all these problems for you, and you don’t have to worry about them.”

What are your future aspirations, and how do you envision Stripe playing a role?

We have been doubling our revenues every year and have now built out the four pillars we are targeting, covering both business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketplaces. Marketplaces are a really exciting space to be in, and we’re looking forward to helping more and more businesses reach their consumers through them, and Stripe is going to be at the core of that journey.

How you can transform your marketplace with Omnyfy and Stripe

Learn more about Omnyfy’s platform features and book a free consultation with the Omnyfy team: https://omnyfy.com/