BuildDirect Wants To Become The Amazon Of The Home Improvement Industry, Launches Marketplace | TechCrunch

BuildDirect is an online marketplace for buying home improvement products. Today, the company is opening its platform to third-party sellers with the launch of its Home Marketplace.

Unsurprisingly, selling heavyweight products like flooring and roofing materials online takes a very different approach to logistics than selling books. As BuildDirect’s co-founder and CEO Jeff Booth and its VP of marketing Joe Thompson told me, the company spent the last few years perfecting its approach to how it ships its goods around the U.S. and Canada.

While the Vancouver, B.C.-based company can’t use FedEx or UPS to ship its goods, though, it’s still taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook by using data analysis to predict demand and adjust pricing to manage it.

Read More