Marketplace for B2B sales into foreign markets Tradalaxy kicks off in Ukraine

Tradalaxy, the global B2B marketplace for direct trade with companies from foreign countries, was launched in Ukraine.

About Tradalaxy

Tradalaxy is an online platform that provides all the necessary functionality for SMEs to start selling globally. Here you can sell any product that is not subject to an export/import ban (weapons, nuclear power) and is not an animal product. The latter is the fundamental rule of the platform.

Aside from that, Tradalaxy allows trading any goods: food and agricultural products, clothing and footwear, sports and recreation goods, cosmetics and electronics, and many other products. “This can be everything: from, for example, linen textiles or solar cell holders to tents or dried apples,” the company says.

Tradalaxy says that local companies often don’t know where to start to enter global markets because they don’t have sufficient expertise and consider export trade to be the exclusive province of multinational corporations. The platform will help them to become a global business.

Our task is to tell the world about the qualitative advantages of Ukrainian products, as well as to minimize the possible risks of international transactions.

Oleksandr Yudytskyi, CEO at Tradalaxy

Oleksandr Yudytskyi, founder and CEO at Tradalaxy

Registration on the platform

While registration on Tradalaxy, the company is required to provide the following documents:

  • Exclusive Rights of Trademark Owner
  • Certificates that certify that the company operations are compliant and meet standards (e.g. ISO or PETA). You can select them from the platform database or the own ones can be uploaded.
  • Confirmation of the office existence, information about the team and information about the company, which will be available for customers to view.
  • Verification of the phone number.

Tradalaxy notes that they will not store user sensitive data on their own – this will be done by partner services: “For example, for payment, there are Fondy (in Ukraine), Stripe, Escrow, and others. These companies have successfully completed transactions of more than $10 billion and guarantee high-security standards. ”

The service will also provide the opportunity to create your own store based on a platform that will work on a subdomain – for example, steel.tradalaxy.com (where steel is the name of the company): “Companies can use their own store separately from the marketplace. It’s connected to Google Shopping and indexed directly.”

Delivery

According to the creators of Tradalaxy, internal services have been built-in to the platform that will deal with logistics. Among them there are container delivery and express mail for small-sized cargo (DHL, USPS): “The seller will not have to bother with a finding of a port, paying for shipping and monitoring it.”

Limitations and restrictions

One of the main problems faced by the creators of Tradalaxy is the import-export regulations of specific states. The team notes that the target audience of the service is business from countries between which free trade agreements are in force (for example, between Ukraine and the EU or Canada). According to the regulations of such agreements, restrictions on the import and export of most goods are prohibited.

However, there are non-tariff trade restrictions, in particular, duty-free quotas. When these quotas are exhausted, delivery is carried out at common customs tariffs, and this increases the cost of production for the buyer.

“Unfortunately, there is no automated monitoring of such data,” Oleksandr Yudytskyi says. “Therefore, the buyer and seller must consider this situation. Possible solutions for the parties are to use the services of 3PL providers and customs brokers at the negotiation stage to understand the situation with a particular product group, or to address the situation on their own.”

Tradalaxy plans to monitor such restrictions and publish the information on the company’s resources, and then – target it to specific users.

“Also, in order to automatically specify these restrictions, we integrated the HS code mapping into the module for adding goods, which the customs services of countries use to determine restrictions and tariffs for products,” the company said.

Current performance and plans

Currently, sellers continue to register on the platform – there are already more than a hundred of them, according to the company. And sales directly will start closer to November.

In addition to Ukraine, Tradalaxy has been launched in France and Canada. Until the end of 2019, the creators plan to connect to the platform the rest of the European Union, the Pacific Partnership countries (Australia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, and others), as well as Israel and Turkey.

Our priority markets are countries that pursue an open international trade policy and aim to take advantage of free trade agreements. There are very new and interesting trade directions for us, such as Canada-the EU, where a free trade agreement has been in force for only two years and is only gaining momentum. In the direction of the EU-Japan, such an agreement has been valid only from February 2019.

Company

The Tradalaxy platform is run by the company of the same name founded in Canada in 2017. Currently, it employs more than 30 people, who work in two offices – in Toronto and Kyiv. In order to organize work in the Ukrainian office, the team founded a local LLC. The Kyiv representative office employs more than 20 people – this is a technical team, project management, business analytics.

Tradalaxy team

Tradalaxy was founded by Ukrainian Oleksandr Yudytskyi. He is a lawyer in international, antitrust and competition law. Since 2015, Yudytskyi has been permanently residing in Toronto, where, in addition to working on the platform, he also advises on international trade and strategies for entering companies and goods into new markets.

According to Yudytskyi, the company is developing through its own investments, financing from a Canadian investor and borrowed funds from a Canadian bank.

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