Little Trade Co

What does Little Trade Co do?

Little Trade Co is a Canberra-based boutique retail store and online marketplace that champions Australian makers, artists and small brands. Operating as a collective retail space, it represents a carefully curated range of independent Australian businesses from its physical store at Federation Square in Gold Creek, with an online store that extends that experience beyond Canberra. The focus is on giving small businesses a beautiful, supported retail presence while offering customers something unique and meaningful.

The problem

Before PuppetVendors, much of the work involved in managing retail partners was manual. As Little Trade Co grew, keeping track of products, sales, commissions, reporting and the information needed from each business became increasingly time-consuming. Reporting, vendor management and payouts were spread across a patchwork of systems, managed by hand inside Shopify and supported by spreadsheets and other administrative work.

The biggest driver to find a solution was growth. Representing around 120 Australian small businesses, the founder knew that adding more manual administration every time a new partner came on board would not scale. Little Trade Co also wanted its online store to become a genuine extension of the physical shop, giving retail partners another way to be discovered and purchased from. It needed a system that could grow with the business rather than make the day-to-day workload harder.

Why PuppetVendors?

Little Trade Co evaluated a number of marketplace options against a clear set of criteria:

• Native Shopify integration

• The ability to manage a large and growing number of retail partners

• A straightforward onboarding experience

• Reliable commission and sales reporting

• Flexibility to suit the way Little Trade Co operates

• Strong, responsive customer support

• A team open to feedback and continued development

Little Trade Co had previously run on Shipturtle, but switched to PuppetVendors because it delivered the flexibility Little Trade Co needed without making things unnecessarily complicated. A huge part of the decision was Martin and the PuppetVendors team, who took the time to understand how Little Trade Co actually operates, answered questions and were willing to adapt or improve things when needed. It felt more collaborative than simply buying a piece of software.

How they rolled it out

Little Trade Co introduced PuppetVendors gradually rather than changing everything overnight. The team set up the structure within Shopify, began bringing retail partners across in stages and refined the process along the way. This staged approach gave them time to work out what made sense for the business, identify improvements and make the experience as straightforward as possible for retail partners. Rather than a single go-live date, roll-out happened progressively over several weeks.

Moving from self-managed processes into a new system meant a period of learning, testing and working out the best fit for a particular business model. Not everything was perfect immediately, but when Little Trade Co raised an issue or suggested an improvement, the PuppetVendors team was responsive and willing to work through it. For a business that does not operate in exactly the same way as every other marketplace, that willingness to understand its goals made a real difference.

Results

Since adopting PuppetVendors, Little Trade Co has seen:

• Clarity across reporting, vendor management and payouts. PuppetVendors replaced a patchwork of systems with a single platform, and Little Trade Co has taken hours off its end-of-month processes.

• Better visibility for retail partners. Vendors now have far better visibility over their own sales and earnings, reducing back-and-forth and building trust.

• A more manageable partner network. A centralised way to manage around 120 Australian small businesses and the large number of products they list, with significantly more streamlined internal workflows.

• A stronger connection between physical and online stores. PuppetVendors has helped build the structure needed to extend the in-store experience to customers outside Canberra and give retail partners additional online exposure.

• A platform built around their model. Several of the features Little Trade Co now relies on came directly from its feedback, and the team continues to build with real-world retail and consignment environments in mind.

Today Little Trade Co supports around 120 active retail partners and approximately 1,738 products across a physical boutique in Canberra and an online store that reaches customers Australia-wide.

Their advice to others

If you're managing a large number of vendors or retail partners through Shopify, I would definitely recommend looking at PuppetVendors. The platform has helped us bring a lot of information and processes together, but for me the support has been just as important. Martin and the team have listened to our feedback, helped us work through challenges and shown a genuine willingness to understand how Little Trade Co operates.