Nautical Commerce Wins Shoptalk Pitch Competition

Nautical Commerce was named the Judges' Choice winner of the Shoptalk 2022 pitch competition! The Shoptalk “Shark Reef” pitch brought 15 retail-technology innovators up on stage to give a three minute presentation followed by Q&A. Our pitch was delivered by Nautical Founder & CEO, Ryan Lee. 

Marketplaces were a hot topic at the Shoptalk pitch and the show. Many of the companies participating in the pitch competition were either a marketplace themselves or were enabling distributed commerce. As a multi-vendor marketplace platform that believes the future of commerce is connected, that was validating for us to see. 

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Below you can find an overview of the winning pitch delivered by Nautical Founder & CEO, Ryan Lee.

Nautical’s Winning Shoptalk Pitch 

The largest and most highly recognized retailers and brands are up on stage at Shoptalk talking about their commerce strategies. We have executives from Alibaba, Walmart, Levi’s, Albertsons, and more sharing their secrets of success.

But do you know what all these respected retailers have in common? They are all running a company-operated multi-vendor marketplace. 

In fact, 9 out of the 10 top retailers in the US have a company-owned marketplace. 

Why are these large companies building marketplaces? Because they realize the future of commerce is connected — where brands and retailers will share their catalogs and syndicate those across one another. 

But building a marketplace is hard. Most brands and retailers have to turn to consulting shops and custom development firms to build a marketplace. And it takes many years and millions of dollars to get their marketplace off the ground. 

Why? Most organizations approach building a marketplace as if it’s a commerce problem. 

What if I told you that marketplaces are not only a commerce system? 

Marketplaces sit at the intersection of commerce, fintech, and logistics. Equal parts. You not only have to remove the friction to buy, but you have to remove the friction to sell when you’re a marketplace operator. 

Any marketplace operator will tell you that the biggest hurdles they face in their endeavor to launch a marketplace are always fintech and logistics problems, like vendor onboarding, financial institution approval, regulatory issues, and, ultimately, payouts. 

Up until today, this tech has been largely unapproachable. It’s been reserved for the biggest of the big. You had to be a software company in order to build a marketplace effectively. 

Nautical doesn’t think you should have to build that tech stack. It’s a commodity. Every marketplace builds the same tech rinse and repeat. 

We’ve built a multi-vendor marketplace platform that allows you to, near-instantly, launch that tech stack so that you can get to what you do best, which is focus on curating the brands, the products, and a delightful buying experience. 

If you want to be part of the future of commerce, the Nautical team would love to talk to you about weaving a marketplace strategy into the fabric of your business model.

The Pitch Participants

The Shoptalk pitch competition was moderated by Deborah Weinswig, CEO and Founder of Coresight Research, and judged by Matt Nicholas, General Partner at Commerce Ventures, Neeta Rastogi Singh, Chief Operating Officer at Activant Capital, and Diana Melencio, Partner at XRC Labs. 

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The Nautical team is proud to have been on stage with some very impressive retail-technology companies.

The other companies participating in the Shoptalk pitch competition were: 

Calico, the operating system for your entire supply chain

EcoCart, sustainability-focused e-commerce enablement company 

Endear, retail & ecommerce CRM software

Glimpse, connecting short-term rentals with product trial experiences 

Humankind, platform for retailers that embraces conversational commerc

Mavi.io, in-car OnMyWay commerce

Max Retail, platform to help retailers and brands sell unsold inventory

Niftmint, NFT commerce infrastructure 

Ownit, one-click checkout technology 

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Re/tell, connecting brands with unused retail space 

Returnmates, return shipping service

ReUpp, tech company that guarantees buy-back for eligible items 

Sayollo, social commerce platform for physical products inside of games

Via.Delivery, sustainable delivery network for DTC brands and online retailers

The Future of Commerce is Connected

With this Shoptalk pitch win under our belts, we’re excited to continue our mission of making marketplace tech more accessible to everyone, from entrepreneurs to enterprises. 

If you are interested in launching a marketplace alongside your existing ecommerce business, want to scale your marketplace on a platform built specifically for marketplaces, or are looking to launch a new marketplace, be sure to reach out to the Nautical team. We’d be happy to chat!