Jetkrate Co-Founder Varun Khetrapal (Photo Supplied)
Supplied Content (Edited)
Auckland, February 21, 2022
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in New Zealand will benefit from the country’s first GST free export marketplace.
The new export model is designed to remove the barriers and costs faced by SMEs keen to export their products by using the same fulfilment process as their domestic customers.
The Jetkrate platform
Retailers keen on joining the new multi-store marketplace can upload their product ranges to the Jetkrate platform. When an overseas customer makes a purchase, the retailer sends the product by courier to a local warehouse which can also consolidate the customer’s other purchases from New Zealand businesses together in one shipment.
The international shipping costs and customs duty are paid by the customer and Jetkrate manages all export paperwork. The marketplace is free to join and there are no additional time, resources or costs required for the retailer to ship offshore than for supplying a domestic customer.
Jetkrate Co-Founder Varun Khetrapal said that New Zealand’s distance significantly increases the cost of selling to customers offshore compared to the domestic market.
He said that many retailers have found it was uneconomical when factoring in the overhead costs of completing customs formalities or managing the risk of credit card fraud.
Integrated Package
“New Zealand SMEs face a common set of barriers when they want to move into exporting. Typically, the sort of issues encountered is around completing customs paperwork for individual orders, the risk of credit card fraud, and the cost of shipping and marketing globally, which reduces their ability to compete. The new model has an integrated international package forwarding service built-in which gives us a significant advantage as we remove all the ‘pain points’ of shipping offshore – including managing the returns process,” he said.
According to Mr Khetrapal, businesses on the new platform can spread the cost of shipping for overseas customers across multiple purchases from the New Zealand market, which makes the goods more price-competitive internationally.
As the products on the marketplace are destined for export markets, their pricing does not include GST, he said.
He cited Sony headphones, an Oppo smartphone and a Garmin watch as examples giving an Australian consumer a saving of $281 if they used the new process for their purchase.
Reducing inefficiencies
“Our goal is to reduce the inherent inefficiencies and overheads associated with sending parcels offshore and bring parity to the international market for our retailer base. The platform is effectively a duty-free retail marketplace – with the ability to ship goods anywhere in the world but without the need for customers to be travelling internationally.
“We know that this model works particularly well when several purchases can be grouped together. When you factor in the GST saved by the customer and lower the cost of consolidated shipping, it can tilt the balance in favour of New Zealand retailers on many products,” he said.
Mr Khetrapal said that his company’s website attracts 7000 overseas visitors every month, complementing its marketing efforts.
He said that companies can export their product lines from e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce and be trading the same day on the new marketplace.
“We could see this working well for local businesses which have been hard hit by the pandemic and looking for ways to grow their sales without investment. Despite global supply chain delays, their freight partners which include DHL and FedEx have sufficient capacity through their transport network, which means goods can be shipped anywhere in the world within as little as two days,” he said.
