Exclusive: Wholesale marketplace Faire looks to introduce ads with key hire

Wholesale marketplace Faire has more than doubled its footprint over the last year, with 600,000 stores and 85,000 brands now represented on its platform.

Founded by a group of former Square employees in 2016, Faire brings modern e-commerce tools to traditional wholesale buying, helping independent stores and indie brands compete with Amazon. It takes a commission on transactions, charging shops 25% for new orders and 15% for reorders.

Now the company, worth more than $12 billion at its last funding round, is preparing to build out its feature set, which could eventually include internal ads that would help surface brands to retailers. To oversee that effort, it has hired Ami Vora, a veteran Meta VP who oversaw the introduction of ads at Instagram, as its first chief product officer.

Discussions around an ad product are still exploratory, and the company has not yet set a date for introducing one.

Like Amazon’s move into advertising, Faire’s shift in that direction would better position the company to monetize the sellers on its platform. In 2021, Amazon made more than $31 billion charging sellers for Prime search results, banner placement, and more.

“[Stores] have a really unique insight into what their customers want, but they’ve been limited in the products they can source, and guessing at what will sell,” says Max Rhodes, Faire cofounder and CEO. “We can start to do a better and better job of matching retailers with the exact right products for them.”

That challenge has grown more complex as Faire has added categories like apparel and food to the gift and home products it focused on at launch. Independent retailers browsing Faire’s offerings might discover knitwear from Norway, mulling spices from South Carolina, and evergreen-shaped candles from Canada.

Rhodes describes ads as “something we’ll look at” in the year ahead. “I think we want to be really careful about the way that we do it,” he says.

As Amazon ads have become a larger piece of the e-commerce giant’s strategy, some sellers have expressed frustration with the pay-to-play dynamic; in order to compete, it’s common for third-party sellers to spend 10% to 20% of their revenue on Amazon ads. But the approach is increasingly commonplace. Etsy, for example, offers both promoted listings and a Google Ads integration so that its makers can coordinate their internal and external campaigns.

At Faire, Rhodes envisions any ad product working hand in hand with search functionality that can better determine user intent. “What does the retailer want, what does the consumer want? The power of this marketplace is the retailer’s intuition, their taste, combined with the power of all this data and all this scale,” he says. Faire integrates with retailers’ point-of-sale systems, allowing it to understand which products are selling in which locations.

Prior to joining Faire, Vora served as head of product and design for WhatsApp. In her new role, in addition to search and ads, she and her team will be responsible for developing features that better serve Faire’s larger retailers, like reminders to restock items and a checkout process that can accommodate large orders.

Despite recessionary fears, some retailers have placed large holiday season orders on Faire, with “Christmas” the most-searched term on the platform in mid-September. But unlike last year, when stimulus checks made shoppers flush with cash, this year retailers expect their customers to be looking for more value.

“We’ve seen a slight increase in retailers actively seeking out lower-priced goods, which I think is a good thing,” Rhodes says. “Big-box retailers have to place their orders a year in advance. Our stores are much more nimble.”

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