The Future of eCommerce:

How Bluefly Excelled at

Supplier Onboarding

Rick Watson, CEO at Merchantry

October 16th, 2014 @ 1:00 pm EST

Today’s Speakers

Rick WatsonCEO

Merchantry

John CarlesVP of Product & Client Services

Merchantry

Randy SmytheSenior Director, Marketplace

Bluefly

Who Is Bluefly?

• Founded in 1998 and headquartered in

New York City

• Targets successful, single career women

(75% female customer base)

• Carries over 50,000 styles and 350 brands

• Has served over 1.5 million customers in

13 countries

How do we onboard vendors more

efficiently and centralize their

data to get more products to

market faster?

The Challenge

• Suppliers more varied than previous in-house systems

• Manual process of data validation

• In-house solution for drop-ship, but limited and manual

• Manual process of exporting data to ATG platform

Bluefly Supplier Onboarding

Before Merchantry

Problem Specifics

• Wanted to add a Marketplace

model to traditional selection

• Needed to increase assortment

dramatically via supplier

expansion

• Needed to improve product

data attribute quality

Search for Solutions

• Continue with one-off

integration for each supplier?

• Build a proprietary solution

internally?

• Search for an experienced

software partner?

Merchantry Product Information

Management Platform

Supplier Onboarding Flow

• Since launching with the Merchantry PIM platform four

months ago, Bluefly has:

Started onboarding new suppliers and products on a weekly

basis. 235 to date.

Added revenue by collecting, validating, and integrating

product data within the centralized portal and then seamlessly

distributing it to Oracle ATG. 82,000 products added in 4 months.

Results

• Things to remember about your own program:

Software can only do so much—supplier communication and

training can be hard work

3-4 Bluefly/Merchantry people dedicated to the program at

scale

Drop-ship program must be coordinated through

merchandising teams, or you invite conflict or turf battles

Gotchas to Look Out For

It’s a lot of work to build a marketplace infrastructure internally. While bigger marketplace retailers often have the have the internal IT resources to take on complex development, most small-to-medium-sized business that are that are looking to develop a marketplace eCommerce model model find it highly beneficial to leverage a partner. With With partners like Merchantry, eCommerce retailers can can streamline the onboarding process and accelerate time time to market.

Randy Smythe

Senior Director, Marketplace at Bluefly

Bluefly’s Reaction

Omnichannel at Shop.org Summit 2014

• Retailers “must evolve or die”

• Consumer expectations have changed

the name of the game to creating a

smooth overall shopping experience,

regardless of channels

• Building brand loyalty and customer

retention is key

• Big data will drive personalization and

provide valuable shopper insights

Questions?

Connect With Us

• Our website: www.merchantry.com

• Follow us on Twitter: @merchantry

• Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Merchantry

• Follow us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/merchantry

Thank You!