Dan Pankratz is a former retailer, co founder of the Exchange Collective, and a long time friend of ours. We checked in with Dan to see whats new with the Exchange Collective.

Brick and mortar retailers are the original marketplace for brands to sell to the end customer. It’s not news that this is changing and changing fast. New online marketplaces are popping up almost daily. 

As brands are looking for more ways to sell directly online and streamline how they get products to the end customer. Online Marketplaces are becoming more and more of a solution. New online marketplaces are leveraging dropship to attract customers to their selections of products. Allowing them to focus on driving traffic to their sites rather than the logistics of managing Pick, Pack and Shipping products. 

As the customer purchasing habits are moving more online, and with online purchase growing more in the past few months that they have in the past 10 years. The importance of giving your customer a way to shop and purchase from you online is more important than ever.

5 Years ago my brother Dave and I started to see the pinch that direct to consumer, amazon, and big eCommerce was having on our own brick and mortar retail business. As we were still recovering from being affected by the last recession. And when we lost our prime location to our big box competition. We wanted to find a solution that would keep the customers we created shopping with us no matter where they were and not be limited by what we had in stock. 

The result was Exchange Collective. 

Over the past 5 years Dave and I, along with Jason Strubing from Skate Works, and John Normoyle who worked in our retail store during collage. Have built a foundation that makes it possible for any retailer of any size do just that. We are we are not computer science graduates with an idea. We are retailers looking for a solution to keep customers shopping from authentic, passionate, and educated retailers. 

Retailers have spent years building up knowledge on the products they sell and serving their local customers with that knowledge and service. Now that the customer had access online to everything that they possibly can buy, there is an 80% chance that they know what they want to buy before they walk in the door. There is nothing worse than seeing one of your customers leave empty handed because you did not have the product they were looking for. 

Exchange Collective gives customers the ability to shop and purchase anything that is available from the manufactures a retailer carry no matter what the retailer may have available in their inventory. This allows the customers to go to local retailers online to shop and then come instore for a customer service experience that cannot be matched online. 

With Exchange Collective the manufactures have a single source of truth for all their products. They can control every aspect of how their products is displayed, priced, and discounted. Unlike other marketplaces, Exchange Collective gives the data collective back to the Manufacturers and Retailers to strengthen their relationship with the customers. 

Using Exchange Collective, retailers can leverage the relationship with their customers to give Manufactures more reach to the customer. Taking away the limitation of cash flow, floor space, and shipping logistics the retailer may have. This creates a shopping experience that the customers are now expecting, Customer Service, Selection, and Convenience.