Mercateo
| Mercateo Germany AG
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1999 |
| Seat |
Munich , Germany 
|
| management |
|
| Number of employees | over 500 (2018) |
| sales | 254 million euros (2017) |
| Branch | Internet trade, wholesale |
| Website | www.mercateo.com |
| Status: 2018 | |
Mercateo Deutschland AG (from Latin mercator , 'businessman'; until September 2018 Mercateo AG) operates an open B2B trading platform on the Internet. Mercateo offers commercial customers the opportunity to search the catalogs of many suppliers for products at the same time. According to the company, over 23 million items are offered in the range. The offer ranges from office supplies to laboratory and IT requirements, storage and business equipment.
development
In 1999 Mercateo AG was founded in Munich by the three former McKinsey consultants Dirk Markus , Harald Fett and Sebastian Wieser. In 2000 E.ON Energie AG took a stake in Mercateo and appointed Peter Ledermann as a member of the board. The business areas of the stock corporation extended beyond the trading platform on the Internet to the IT project business and e-solutions. When E.ON left, Sebastian Wieser and Peter Ledermann carried out a management buy-out in 2003 . From now on, Mercateo concentrated exclusively on the retail model. In 2004 Mercateo Services GmbH was founded in Köthen (Anhalt) as a 100 percent subsidiary of Mercateo Beteiligungsholding AG. It takes over the operative business of the online retailer. In 2011 websites were launched in the Netherlands, France, Italy and Spain.
At the end of September 2018, the trading business of Mercateo AG was spun off into the new Mercateo Deutschland AG and the original AG was renamed Unite Network AG , under which only the "networking platform " Mercateo Unite is operated.
At the beginning of 2020, Mercateo Beteiligungsholding AG relocated its headquarters from Munich to Leipzig .
Business model
Mercateo is an online retailer with a multi-supplier catalog, a middleman without its own warehouse. The trading partners and their delivery conditions are or were displayed in contrast to classic middlemen. Since February 2009, the majority of trading partners have been pseudonymized, i. This means that the original supplier is no longer displayed to the customer by name. Mercateo handles the transactions between customers and trading partners. Mercateo is the sole contact person for the customer and regulates orders, complaints and returns on their behalf. The offer is aimed exclusively at business customers in Germany. The assortment ranges from articles for general business needs to specialized supplies.
In contrast to traditional retail, pricing on the Mercateo platform is not created through the allocation of procurement volumes that are time-bundled to individual suppliers in order to achieve low purchasing conditions, but through daily competition between the providers.
The disadvantage of the system is the technical complexity, which results from the fact that although the competition takes place at the item level, an entire shopping cart with sometimes several items (and then possibly multiple shipping costs from individual suppliers) must be optimized for the customer. To solve this problem, Mercateo has a shopping cart optimization.
Mercateo offers an attempt to optimize delivery conditions. Mercateo calls this “shopping basket optimization” or “best basket”. Identical products from different suppliers are compared, for example to find a lower total price for a shopping cart. The program observes minimum order values, shipping costs and can be prioritized according to delivery time, number of suppliers or price. In theoretical computer science, shopping cart optimization falls into the class of NP-complete problems.
numbers and facts
- over 23.5 million articles from over 16,400 manufacturers
- around 700 suppliers
- over 1.5 million registered business customers
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Mercateo in facts and figures ( Memento from December 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 390.49 kB)
- ↑ a b c d [1] Press information on Mercateo
- ↑ [2] Press release on the new board member Bernd Schönwälder
- ↑ a b [3] B2B superhero grows to 254 million euros in sales
- ↑ a b [4] Breaking the sound barrier: Mercateo achieved sales of over 250 million euros in 2017
- ↑ [5] Online platform: Mercateo is growing at double digits
- ↑ Mercateo continues to expand in Europe / Netherlands - France, Italy and Spain under construction ( Memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
- ^ Mercateo Unite
- ↑ Leipziger Internet Zeitung: By 2023 the new headquarters of the Mercateo Group is to be built on Grimmaischer Steinweg - L-IZ.de. July 16, 2020, accessed August 11, 2020 .
- ↑ [6] Mercateo FAQ on shopping cart optimization