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Sponsored: How Spiritrade is putting safety first
With safety and security being essential in the drinks industry, Spiritrade’s solid vetted marketplace aims to combat these issues, says founder Jimmy Metta.
Following its relaunch in November, global drinks marketplace Spiritrade has been gaining an increasing number of members and seeing trade rise exponentially on its platform. The point of the redesign and relaunch of the platform was to make for both faster and more flexible trading, but also a more secure and safer environment.
Unfortunately, as Spiritrade founder Jimmy Metta explains, fraudsters and unverified traders are a sad fact of life, which is why the “core principal and value” of Spiritrade is safety. “Our job at Spiritrade is to ensure only quality members are approved and have access to the platform,” he explains. “And we do extensive due diligence on every single member that uses the platform.”
Each new applicant is appraised using both open source material and through consultation with related parties such as warehouse partners. “We’ve had very strong traffic from new members all over the world,” continues Metta.
“We have rejected new members that are not reputable or creditable, partly because they don’t provide us with enough documentation. “Since we relaunched in November, we’ve had over 80 new members, and while many have passed the inspection, others haven’t.”
Once the initial screening is done, however, there is still the matter of trading security on the platform itself to ensure their is “zero transactional risk”. Metta explains that Spiritrade is “very much in the middle between the buyer and the seller”. He adds that the platform acts as an escrow between each trading party.
If one member buys anything from a counter party, be it a case of beer or Champagne, will only be deployed once the goods are safely in Spiritrade’s account and full inspection is completed.
Spiritrade also has to authorise “every single listing before it goes live on the platform”, to ensure that genuine stock is being uploaded for trade. Even though there is “constant activity and demand for stockholders from brokers wanting to trade in this industry, our core principal and value is safety. We double and triple check everything throughout,” explains Metta.
He reveals that these controls can also extend to which global markets brand owners would like to offer their stock to – and which ones to exclude. All of this is made clear in each offer, as well as in the terms and conditions, and a member from an excluded market making a bid on a product will find their purchase nullified. “Brand owners can feel a lot more secure as to where and to who the stock is being sold,” says Metta.
As he says, the surest way to build credibility and attract new members is by making sure only reputable traders are allowed and that each trade is handled in a controlled and secure way. By creating a “trusted community” through Spiritrade, Metta says he is, “determined to make our marketplace one where buyers and seller can feel safe and secure trading stock at any time”.