Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Hana Graham, Head of Marketing and Communications at Storfund:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: What we do is really simple: we pay marketplace sellers for what they sell, on the day they sell. If you are not a seller, you are probably wondering why this matters. The answer is that marketplaces like Amazon hold back customer payments for 20 – 45 days in order to make it easy to give refunds – key to customer trust. But this stops sellers from operating like normal retailers to restocking when they sell.
We work with a huge variety of sellers all over the world; from resellers of chocolates and refurbished mobile phones, to sellers who design and manufacture their own products like children’s toys.
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: Ecommerce is growing at breakneck speed. 50% of purchases worldwide are now made on marketplaces and Amazon added 1.4 million new sellers last year. All of this growth is fuelled by customer demand, but if sellers don’t have good cashflow they can’t restock and meet this demand.
There’s also another dimension, long term profitability. Over a year, faster payments = shorter cash cycles = increased profits. What do we mean by that? In ecommerce, cash cycles matter. A cash cycle is the length of time between paying out money to a supplier for inventory and getting that money back in sales. If you reduce the time this cycle takes, then over a year you can sell more and increase your profits. Watch our 2 minute video showing the difference that shorter cash cycles can make to a seller with annual sales of a million. It’s this long term impact really makes a difference to sellers with fast growing businesses, that’s why 60% of clients who’ve joined us since we started in 2018 are still with us today.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement? What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months?
A: We recently announced a number of new partners and new hires. We started out on Amazon, offering our service on 17 out of 20 Amazon marketplaces, but over the last couple of years there’s been increasing recognition across all marketplaces that ecommerce has a cashflow problem and we’ve been approached by other marketplaces who want to add Storfund to their seller services.
We have a number of new marketplaces coming online this year. Not only will this let us reach more sellers, we can also support our existing customers to expand to new marketplaces. Marketplaces have transformed international selling for small businesses and we are passionate about supporting this: 50% of our sellers expand to another country in the first year of becoming a client.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: What we do is actually not a new service, it was around in ancient Mesopotamia; the technical name is factoring. But in the past it was always seen as a bit of a dull service, and not one that B2C retailers needed because their customers paid them straight away. But the growth of marketplaces has changed all of this, and suddenly factoring has become essential. What we’ve done that’s new is integrate factoring into marketplaces, it means the service is completely frictionless – clients don’t have to submit sales data or payment requests, they simply get paid.
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