British health and beauty retailer Boots, a member of Walgreens Boots Alliance, has revealed plans to launch an online marketplace to stock third-party brands.
Scheduled to launch early next year, Boots Marketplace will partner with new suppliers from the health, beauty, baby and wellness sectors.
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Products on the marketplace will be integrated with the company’s existing product range on boots.com, offering customers selections from new brands and sellers.
In addition to a single checkout for mixed baskets, Boots Marketplace will offer all Boots’ existing shopping benefits, including Boots Advantage Card points.
The planned expansion is in line with Boots’ ongoing digital strategy to extend its website range and to provide customers with more new product categories.
Boots chief digital officer Paula Bobbett said: “Marketplace is the exciting next step in our digital transformation programme.
“We’re approaching this new opportunity for Boots with a deep understanding of our customers and the health, beauty and wellness products that they want to buy, and helps us to work with new smaller and entrepreneurial brands.
“Marketplace will allow us to build on the strength of our existing business to offer an even bigger range of choice for consumers and be the first to market with emerging brands and new products.”
The platform will be powered by Mirakl, an advanced enterprise marketplace software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
Mirakl customer success executive-vice president Sophie Marchessou said: “Boots is a heritage brand loved and trusted by British consumers, and in launching its new marketplace, it is delivering on its promise to deliver customers more of the products they want, from a carefully curated selection of third-party suppliers that meet the company’s extremely high-quality standards.
“As Mirakl continues to power the marketplaces of some of the UK’s biggest brands, we are delighted to be working with Boots, a champion of British retail.”
