You could say the Fyndiq story started with 800 bamboo vases. Fredrik Norberg, the CMO and co-founder of Fyndiq found some vases he found attractive, and the seller was giving steeper and steeper discounts for buying in bulk. “He bought over 800 and thought he was going to be a millionaire because no one had them. In his first year he sold two,” says CEO and co-founder Dinesh Nayar.
Later Norberg would work at an ecomerce logistic center, and he found that the problem was not his own. “It’s super simple to startup up your e-commerce business,” says Nayar. “You can start it no problem but when you’re not getting any sales a year later its hard to drive more traffic to your own site.”
So in response, three years ago they started Fyndiq, an ecommerce platform that started from a small startup to today boasting they’re breaking even and have a turnover of close to €14 million. “For us that’s been an important milestone because as entrepreneurs we want revenue stream from day one, and we want to build a long-lasting company.”
Fyndiq is essentially an online outlet store, where any e-retailer can place their inventory that’s not selling onto Fyndiq’s platform. The benefit to these retailers is that they don’t have to heavily discount products and therefore devalue their own brand, while also plugging into Fyndiq’s volume of shoppers looking for a good deal.
Here in the B2B2C space retailers dump products and customers get a good deal. Everyone is happy, especially Fyndiq, which takes a 5% selling fee at the transaction and doesn’t have to worry about the messier side of ecommerce, like keeping inventory or actually shipping physical goods. The concept is pretty much infinitely scaleable. Retailers can list their products for free, meaning shoppers can find plenty of products at low prices. The retailers then ship out the products, and payment is successfuly given to the retailers
“As we started getting more traffic and more inventory, merchants realized [Fyndiq is] a simple sales channel and our inventory grew,” says Nayar. “Our focus has always been on building subcategories where we get good CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) and CPO (Cost Per Order) levels. Then our sales team and market team work extensively with more merchants to fill up this sub category. When we have a broad range it converts much better.”
Fyndiq is currently focused only on the Swedish market, which they say has been their test market, but clearly the company is looking at expanding geographically.
To date the company has raised €4 million from Swedish business angels, and is looking at raising “a larger investment round” to get the muscle to expand. To do so, they’ll somewhat be starting from scratch again in a new market, having to build a brand and make their localized version appealing to new shoppers, but clearly they’ve learned a lot scaling up Fyndiq in Sweden.
For more info, here’s a huge Infographic with some stats on the company:
