E-commerce has been booming for the past few years, with global retail e-commerce sales having more than doubled in the past five years. In 2017, global e-retail sales amounted to around $2.4 trillion. In 2021, this number increased to around $5.2 trillion.
Consequently, it has received a lot of media attention, which has not only garnered interest from venture capitalist investors but also from retail investors. However, small private investors have a hard time profiting from the e-commerce boom.
There are not many investment opportunities for small retail investors, and creating a brand from scratch is a strenuous undertaking. So, retail investors are left on the sidelines to watch as venture capital firms rake in profits in a market that is expected to grow to over $8 trillion by 2026.
On the other side of the equation, there are many entrepreneurs who are looking to sell their established e-commerce brands as well as novel brand concepts. Not all of these e-commerce entrepreneurs can secure funding from venture capital investors, and those who can’t have a hard time finding fitting retail investors.
With its new online marketplace for e-commerce brands, Scaleup Brands might finally enable these e-commerce brand owners and retail investors to find together and profit from the e-commerce boom.
Buying and selling e-commerce brands and concepts
Scaleup Brands is a digital marketplace that aims to connect investors with fitting e-commerce brands. To ensure a seamless experience for all parties, the online marketplace requires both investors as well as brand owners to pass an extensive and strict selection process. In other words, a team of experts collects and analyses all relevant data to evaluate whether a brand or investor meets the high standards.
Apart from providing investors and brand owners with a transparent, secure, and convenient way of connecting, Scaleup Brands offers countless other new opportunities. For example, investors can use the marketplace to easily diversify their portfolios by buying a completely unique brand in a completely new niche.
Further, by purchasing an e-commerce brand, investors can directly participate in a rapidly growing market without having to develop their own product, which is time-consuming and capital-intensive. On Scaleup Brands, there are two different kinds of products. Investors can either buy established, successful e-commerce brands, or they can buy brand concepts.
These brand concepts are usually significantly cheaper than already existing brands, but they offer the possibility of a much higher return on investment. Also, the brand concepts that are sold on Scaleup Brands are fully fleshed out, meaning that product research, development, and manufacturing have already been taken care of.
Additionally, since there are also investors without extensive prior knowledge of operating an e-commerce brand, the platform supports investors in running their newly acquired brand.
In other words, due to the platform’s partners and its team of experts, retail investors can buy an established brand or a brand concept and start generating sales as soon as the contract is signed.
How this impacts the e-commerce market as a whole
While there are many e-commerce brands that get bought or funded by big venture capital firms and other big investors, most of them don’t. However, because of the trajectory that the e-commerce market has been on and is still on, there are now a lot of new but well-established e-commerce brands.
The owners of those brands might want to sell their brands to build a new brand in another niche, or they might want to develop and create a new brand concept without having to run another business.
They might want to exit for a plethora of reasons. Before, this would have been a long and complicated process, and many brands just faded into obscurity as a result of that. At the same time, many retail investors want to get into the e-commerce market to profit from its boom.
With a marketplace like Scaleup Brands, e-commerce brand owners and small retail investors can now connect and benefit in their own ways. Not only does this bring benefits for specific investors and brand owners, but it also strengthens the e-commerce sector as a whole, providing better entry and exit points for smaller players.
