Company Spotlight: Doba
by Christina Lee on February 9th, 2009
Last year’s stories of financial success, while rare, all demonstrated how businesses adapted to the economic environment – and in some cases, made themselves indispensible. Doba, a Utah-based software company, offered such a story.
Since 2002, Doba has hosted its own marketplace for drop shipping, catering to all aspects of selling products: manufacturing, distributing, and retailing. Its Web site and platform hosts about 1.5 million unique products from more than 250 suppliers, and thus has the potential to create thousands of buyer-seller relationships.
“We are exclusively focused on managing that supply, in helping retailers and suppliers simplify that process,” said Blaine Nielsen, CEO.
The convenience it provides for both retailers and suppliers has resulted in major growth. In fact, last year’s growth was a 400 percent increase from its 2007 profit, Nielsen said. The company also ranked high on Deloitte’s North American Technology Fast 500 and MountainWest Capital Utah’s lists.
Nielsen and the company attribute much of the past year’s success to its Product Sourcing application performance interface (API). Launched last February, the Product Sourcing API allows retailers to use the company’s supply chain programming within their own applications, for functions ranging between searching product catalogs and pulling shipping information.
Following its launch came ten new partners, though the Product Sourcing API adds to the overall cost and time-efficient services that Doba provides. For one, the company taps into the rising popularity of drop shipping, which Nielsen called “enticing in a recessionary time.”
Online retailers can test their target market and suppliers can market products supplementary to their tried-and-true, without much risk.
“There’s a lot less financial investment in there,” Nielsen said. “Even to the extreme that they don’t make any money out of it, at least they are getting over that hurdle.”
In addition, access to its marketplace saves both retailers and suppliers from most of the painstaking process that usually comes with finding potential customers. The company, after all, strives to combine “the supplier’s distributing ability and the retailer’s purchasing power at a single connection point,” its Web site states.
For 2009, Nielsen hopes that Doba continues to expand in all possible ways, by increasing their number of suppliers, products, and partners.
“We hope to turn the number of new partners into 20 or 30,” he said.