This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

We’re incredibly happy to announce that we’ve evolved JadoPado into a marketplace for buyers and sellers from around the world!

Early last year we started asking a bunch of hard questions around how to bring more choice, more categories, more inventory and better prices to JadoPado — without having to do all of it ourselves.

We began where I usually like to begin, by asking what are we really good at? After a while we realised that it wasn’t so much what we were selling, but more that we think we’ve figured out how to sell and execute online, in the region.

If you mesh that with all the conversations that we’ve had around payments, technology, execution and a bunch of other stuff, from everyone who’s sought our advice, it led us to thinking that there’s a bigger opportunity in terms of providing a venue for e-commerce to take place versus trying to do it all ourselves.

Karlo got stuck in with some design ideas and Jobin and his team of engineers got cracking with the marketplace as a side project. Over the next few months, it evolved into a more fully formed product before we scrapped the UI and re-did it from scratch, a few weeks before we were to go into a live beta. While painful, it turned out to be a great decision versus the product that we were to be bring to market.

As the engineering process approached the finish line, it became clear that the marketplace couldn’t be an add-on and represented an evolution of JadoPado from retailer to venue.

We’ve addressed the major challenges of selling online by building easy to use tools to allow sellers to manage their stores. Products, offers, and order management are all baked into the experience as well as the ability to customise stores to create unique branded experiences.

Setting up a store with JadoPado takes a few minutes. As a seller, you can add offers to existing products in our catalogue or create new products across 16 top level categories and over 5500 sub categories. Orders and shipping are handled through a well thought out interface allowing you to ship directly to customers the way you want, whether it be with your own fleet or a third party carrier.

We handle payments on behalf of sellers with an integrated multi-seller checkout process, and protect you from fraud while also securing buyers’ payment details and personal information. You can request to be paid out to any bank account globally once a buyer has received their purchase.

This clearly moves away from the approach of yesterday’s marketplaces, which attempt to be the narrowing conduit through which fulfilment and customer management is forced to take place. We’re all about providing the right tools and getting out of the way.

Whether you’re a seller in the region looking to expand your offering to a global customer base or are an international seller attempting to start selling into the region, we’re both an efficient channel for testing new products as well as an interesting source of new revenue.

If you are a buyer, it’s all about incredible product and price choice across a wide range of categories and an easy to use, secure experience. Message sellers with your queries before or after purchase and use reviews to give sellers honest feedback about your experience.

Through our new identity JadoPado Direct, we’ll continue selling directly to consumers, businesses, government and trade in the way that you’re used to — super fast deliveries across the planet with strong doses of great customer support thrown in!

Find out more about selling with us by jumping over to Sell with JadoPado.