E-Commerce Marketplace Aggregators Are Hot On Thrasio’s Heels As Companies Raise $2.3B

Thrasio represents a new kind of roll-up: a digital roll-up. They are buying small businesses built on one of the largest online platforms in the world. With it, they will capture economies of scale.

While the first wave may be third-party seller rollups, the next wave could be software companies that power them. And more ancillary markets will come out of all this.

The optics of successful liquidity events for Blue Nile, Zullily, Chewy and Zappos, and the incredible traction in the 2000s of The GAP as a public vertical consumer brand established meaningful consumer business outcomes. These potential to repeat history through a new crop of Direct to Consumer upstarts paired well with the pent up venture capita... See more

Covid-19 has created short-term winners and losers. But the more structural impact is that trends already under way have been accelerated. Everything was already moving online. Now this is happening even faster. Online marketplaces now have a combined value of $814 billion globally. 58% of consumer marketplaces could be well-positioned to navigate ... See more

But for now – there is not a lot of capital in the space, and many of these sellers cannot keep up with their own growth. The easiest way to get de-ranked is by running out of inventory, but a business that can’t get financed, is fully bootstrapped, and that is growing quickly (with holiday season volatility) will struggle to procure inventory fina... See more

Despite a pandemic that accelerated the shift toward e-commerce, and continued market share shifts away from giant, legacy brands, there hasn’t been a billion-dollar-plus buying spree of direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies.