Take it easy, there’s no rush

Retail is typically a fast-paced sector but there are exceptions to this rule and the planned launch of EasyShop as an e-commerce site is a great example because trading from such a website was first considered back in 1999, an incredible 27 years ago.

Easyshop was originally the name of online lingerie business Figleaves (which is now a branded range under the ownership of N Brown) until Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of EasyJet, threatened the company with legal action as he wanted to potentially use the name as part of his growing Easy family of brands alongside the airline, EasyMoney and EasyBus etc…

Michael Ross, CEO of Easyshop at the time, suggested that he also owned EasyRentaBra and that this might be an ideal candidate for a collaboration with Haji-Ioannou’s EasyRentaCar business. A perfect fit you could say. The Greek businessman was not amused by the joke and proceeded to sue. Hence the Figleaves name was born and the EasyJet founder then began the 27-year long spell of sitting on the EasyShop name…until now.

Although it had had rather a long gestation period, at least the site is adopting the marketplace model, which has certainly proven itself as a hot area of retail over recent years. Such platforms are a great way for retailers to expand their product ranges, attract new customers, and unlock growth without carrying the same inventory risk as traditional retail models whereby loads of stock sits around in warehouses.

The growing roster of retailers with marketplaces alongside their core e-commerce businesses includes Tesco, Mountain Warehouse, Next, Superdrug, Clarks and Asos. Debenhams has gone as far as to shift to being a pure marketplace model having jettisoned its own trading website. Argos is also set to join the party having announced it is to launch its own platform within the next year. The upsides can be big judging by the success of B&Q whose marketplace now has an inventory of around two million products that generate 45% of the company’s total e-commerce sales.

EasyShop will sit upon the OnCommerce technology from OnBuy that has its own marketplace, which the company says has expanded by more than 86% over the past three years and supports over 100 million products across Europe. Several of its markets are also delivering quarterly growth of more than 150%.

Stuart Greenfield, UK and European sales director at Advanced Supply Chain, describes the rise of such platforms as ‘Marketplacification’ and he predicts a continued acceleration of a trend that he reckons is also being influenced by the rapid growth of social commerce platforms such as TikTok Shop, where consumers increasingly expect broad product choice, convenience and discovery in a single destination. Against this backdrop retailers are shifting from being pure merchants to instead becoming curators, facilitators and operators of larger retail ecosystems.

The plan for EasyShop is to enter mainstream online retail selling across 21 European countries later this year, which very much marks a major expansion for the EasyGroup business into everyday shopping and will be built around its long-standing focus on simplicity and value, so says the company. Which brands it manages to attract onto the platform remains to be seen and it is this that will ultimately determine its success or failure. If it fails then there is, of course, always the option of the rental business suggested by Ross.