Cut Out the Middlemen. All of Them.

01 /The Concept

Stockly built a virtual infinite warehouse for online retailers.

The idea: when a product goes out of stock at one store connected to the Stockly platform, the platform automatically fulfills the order using inventory from another connected store. The customer never sees an "out of stock" message – the product ships from a different warehouse without any manual intervention.

For the selling store, the benefit is clear. Every "out of stock" moment erodes trust; enough of them and customers leave permanently. Routing those orders through Stockly keeps the customer relationship intact and earns the store a commission on goods it didn't hold itself – money it would have otherwise lost entirely.

Setup is lightweight. A retailer connects its storefront and inventory system to Stockly once; from then on the platform intercepts incoming orders, checks local stock, and – if the item is unavailable – identifies the best-priced, nearest-located supplier in the network and redirects the order automatically. Billing across all parties is also handled by the platform through consolidated invoices, since the same store can act as both buyer and supplier depending on the order.

Supplying into Stockly is equally attractive: it gives retailers a way to move inventory faster through other stores' storefronts, improving the velocity of capital tied up in stock. No extra integration needed beyond connecting the inventory feed and pointing Stockly at the order form – from the supplier's perspective, a Stockly-routed order looks identical to a direct customer purchase.

Suppliers can also control exposure: they can share only select product categories or surface only items that have sat in stock beyond a certain age – a clean mechanism for clearing slow-moving goods.

More than 300 European retailers are now connected to Stockly, collectively listing over 100 million products. The company says it's on track to reach operational break-even this year if current growth holds.

A [previous review](/review/kak-net-na-sklade) covered Stockly in late 2022. The new funding round of €26M brings total investment to €43.1M.

02 /Why It Matters

The virtual-warehouse concept isn't unique to Stockly. Carro ([covered here](/review/partnjorstva-kak-servis)) uses the same underlying mechanism but for a different purpose: surfacing complementary products from other stores to a customer mid-checkout, driving up average order value with goods the host store doesn't carry. Carro collects a commission on those cross-store sales and has pulled in $50M in funding. REPOWR ([related review](/review/novyj-tip-marketplejsov)) applied the same logic to freight: a virtual garage where trucking companies can rent underutilized vehicles from each other by location and time slot – $12.7M raised.

But inside Stockly's model there's a more interesting structural tension. The baseline vision is horizontal – same-size retailers covering each other's gaps. What's actually happening may be something else. Stockly lists major chains like Decathlon and Carrefour among its clients. It's hard to imagine that a retailer at that scale signed up primarily to source products from small independent shops. The more likely draw: those large chains want their inventory distributed through smaller stores – using Stockly as a virtual B2B procurement layer.

In that mode the platform takes on a different character. Small retailers gain access to multiple major suppliers without exclusive agreements, minimum order commitments, or the usual distribution constraints. The platform becomes a real-time auction: for each order, it selects the supplier with the best combination of current price and delivery speed to the end customer.

Matchory ([reviewed previously](/review/eshhjo-odin-sposob-sozdanija-globalnogo-biznesa)), which raised €7.6M building a database of global manufacturers and suppliers, was noted in an earlier review for lacking a value-added layer beyond the directory itself. The logical extension would be adding a logistics layer and an AI engine that matches live supply with live delivery capacity in real time. That's almost precisely how Stockly works in vertical mode – just without the global scope.

Global scope introduces a delivery-time problem, since local retailers are often chosen precisely because they ship fast. Zimi ([related review](/review/zarabotaj-na-tom-chto-ono-stanet-bystree-i-deshevle)), a Y Combinator alum that raised $2M shortly after graduating, has a credible answer: it lets exporters pre-position inventory in local warehouses abroad, using demand forecasting to ship goods cheaply before they're ordered. For in-stock items in those local caches, delivery times drop to days and costs fall by 80%, with exporters seeing 20% revenue gains. The mechanism is essentially CDN logic applied to physical goods – cache the most popular items close to where they're consumed, and serve them from there rather than from the origin.

Add Zimi-style local caching to Stockly's virtual warehouse and the architecture scales globally.

03 /Opportunities

The right ambition level shapes which direction makes sense.

The first option is building a virtual warehouse, garage, or inventory pool on the Stockly, Carro, or REPOWR model – a purely software play that works at regional scale, where cross-store delivery times are close enough that the seams don't show.

The second is more ambitious: going after a slice of global trade. That requires the virtual layer plus a network of local fulfillment nodes. Zimi's current model puts that burden entirely on exporters, who have to fund advance shipments and freeze capital in foreign warehouses – feasible for large suppliers, difficult for small ones.

The modification worth exploring: a platform that recruits local retailers to co-fund advance imports of high-demand goods into a shared virtual warehouse, from which multiple stores can sell. This turns those retailers into micro-distributors who earn fees proportional to their capital contribution when other stores move the goods. If multiple retailers co-fund a single SKU, the structure becomes collective B2B procurement with built-in distribution revenue sharing.

Which version is worth building depends on how large you want to play.