Building the World’s Largest Marketplace for Digital Entertainment with Dorota Wróbel of G2A

E-commerce Visionary: Dorota Wróbel’s Leadership in Digital Entertainment

Dorota Wróbel is a results-driven business development expert, currently serving as the Chief R&D Officer at G2A, where she passionately shapes customer-centric business development strategies in the rapidly expanding global gaming market. With a specialized focus on e-commerce, Dorota is a trailblazer in revolutionizing online shopping experiences. Her commitment to diversity is evident, firmly believes that the best outcomes arise from teams with diverse, interdisciplinary backgrounds, and she is a strong advocate for women in tech.

In her current role, Dorota leverages her extensive experience in managing complex international projects and leading teams through fast-paced transformations. As a seasoned professional, she has successfully navigated the challenges of the dynamic business environment, ensuring operational compliance and driving growth. Dorota’s journey at G2A began in the sales division, where she honed her skills in driving commercial success, providing her with a holistic understanding of the business from its foundational stages.

Beyond her professional endeavors, Dorota is not only an accomplished business leader but also an avid cycling enthusiast and documentaries geek. Her multifaceted interests reflect her dynamic approach to life, both in and out of the business realm. With a keen eye for innovation and a dedication to fostering inclusive environments, Dorota Wróbel continues to leave an indelible mark on the intersection of e-commerce and the gaming industry.

Episode Transcript

Dorota Wróbel: Users are much more willing to use the payment methods they are familiar with, and many regions have their own very popular locally payment solutions. For example, in Poland, if the league be some in Spain or Stanford in Germany. We also see the biggest popularity of PayPal in the US, then in Europe, of course. So, that means that we have to think about those behaviors. Working with many PSPs also means making sure that our marketplace standards are up to date with security requirements.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Welcome to PayPal, the payments industry podcast. Each week, we’ll bring you in-depth conversations with leaders who are shaping the payments and fintech world. From payment processing to risk management, and from new technology to entirely new payment types. If you want to know what’s happening in the world of fintech and payments, you’re in the right place. Hello everyone, and welcome to Pay Pod. I’m your host, Jacob Hollabaugh, and today on the show, we are going to be talking about one of the most technologically advanced industries we have, which is the gaming industry and the entertainment industry, an industry not mentioned often on this show, but maybe it should be, as it is kind of on the bleeding edge of adoption and integration of technology, which includes things like financial infrastructure. Our core topic here at Pay Pod, specifically today, we’re going to discuss building a marketplace for the gaming community, all things payments, and the infrastructure that comes with that. Joining me to discuss these topics is Dorota Wrobel, chief R&D officer at G2 Eircom, the world’s largest marketplace for digital entertainment. Throughout the. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Dorota Wróbel: Thank you very much. Hello everyone. Happy to be here and to talk with you. Jacob.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yes, the pleasure is mine. Let’s start with a bit of an overview if you’re willing. Who is G2A, explain the marketplace that you’ve all built, and a bit about how the company got from where it started to where it is today.

Dorota Wróbel: So, g2a.com is basically the world’s largest and most trusted marketplace for digital entertainment, where people can find different digital products, items like digital game codes, DLCs, in-game items, as well as non-gaming items like gift cards, subscriptions, software, and also other vouchers offered by stores from all over the world. And we have got more than 25 million people who have already made purchases on our website, which is, I think, a quite impressive number. We, of course, started in a really small office in Poland, like, 13 years ago, and we were just a few people with big dreams and even bigger ambitions. We started as a typical online shop, and then we realized that it’s good to have an idea of the marketplace. Let’s say early on that was in our minds and a small team was led, let’s say by two founding fathers. One of them is our CEO Bartosz Skwarczek. After some time, we were seeing very few limitations of this business. And we decided to approach the trend to moving from boxed distribution into the world of digital. We paid attention to that. And I think that the rest of the industry was not focused so much on that trend. They were just focused on boxed versions of the games. In 2010, 70% of the market was physical. Today, nobody is thinking even about buying games in physical boxes. Maybe, collectibles once, but not the take for day-to-day use. So, we decided to be a instead of sole distributor a marketplace model. So we allow sellers and buyers to meet in a safe, insecure space and put, actually emphasis on facilitating the selling and buying process itself.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Who makes up the two sides of your marketplace then? Who are kind of your typical buyers, and then who are your typical sellers that are using your marketplace?

Dorota Wróbel: Our buyers have historically been mainly gamers. I would even call them hardcore gamers who were looking for the best deals to find digital entertainment and gaming. Right now, we have adopted a new strategy that aims to bring in a more mainstream user, someone who is looking to get into the world of digital entertainment and doesn’t know where to start or how to start. Recently, during lockdowns. In new Actually, it’s new and wants to find an easy and smooth entry point to this new world, right? So we are offering not just games, but also different other products. However, for the people who would like to start the adventure with gaming, I guess that we are the perfect place to start.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah. From the tech infrastructure perspective, because, as you said, you were one of the first to say we should maybe move away from the physical stuff and get over to the digital world, which is great foresight by yourself and everyone at the company, but does come with it’s easy to say that. But there’s a lot that goes into the digital side, more even possibly than goes into the physical product side. So from building that tech infrastructure, what’s kind of the hardest part If you could single anything out of building a marketplace platform?

Dorota Wróbel: I think that the first thing that I would mention here is that the most difficult thing is finding the right offer to their buyers and making sure that sellers have gotten that stock. So matching those two customers of the company, buyers and sellers, and making sure that both are happy. And the second one I think is payments and security, being sure that people can sign the payment method that they like and we are present in 180 countries. So, we really need to adjust that offer regionally at the same time with their behaviors. And also, gamers, are early adopters of new technology stuff and security in the digital world. I think it’s given much more importance every year, especially after lockdown. We have got many people who are not really prepared to be online, and sometimes they are getting trapped. And so our mission is to make sure that only the way the top priority is security. We do have also internal and external partners that are working on that, using AI, etc., and partners that are helping to protect the marketplace actors worldwide.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, it’s a lot to keep track of. And I want to ask you about a few of those individual things you called out there, starting with the payments front, the core topic matter here at PayPal, you’re in over 180 countries, I believe you said, which is incredible and very impressive, but does come with a lot of options that are needed for those different places and different payment methods. I read you have over 200, now payment methods available at your checkout process. How important is it to your users to have a lot of options at the point of checkout? Was that a big hurdle for you to overcome, or is it something that is super important to your buyer community to have all of these payment methods available?

Dorota Wróbel: I think that there are several answers to that. Users are much more willing to use the payment methods they are familiar with, and many regions have their own very popular and locally payment solutions. For example, in Poland, if the league be some in Spain or Stanford in Germany, we also see the biggest popularity of PayPal in the US, then in Europe, of course. So, that means that we have to think about those behaviors, local and favorite options, and they think about which of them is the most convenient. This is the key thing and working with many species also means making sure that our marketplace standards are up to date with security requirements. So, that’s complicated and in order to keep those partnerships up, we undergo regular audits by them. They auditing representatives by PwC big 4, which confirms that we are trustworthy and safe for them to entrust their partnership with us.

Jacob Hollabaugh: On that security front. Of the many impressive things about G2A, one that stood out was that your fraud rate for your checkout process was extremely low, 0.2%. I think I saw somewhere on your website or in one of your blog posts, compared to a global average of 2.9%. So, really very impressive. I would think maybe I’m wrong, please tell me if I’m wrong about this. But a marketplace in general usually has to deal with more fraud, I would say, than most e-commerce and the world of gaming, and some of the different products you’re offering. To me seems like places that are ripe for fraud. So it would make me think this is the type of place that would have much more of it. Not a lot less for you to have such a low number. It really stands out, as I would imagine, being a huge advantage for you. Am I correct that this is a world that would be a little more? There would be more fraud going on, so it makes it harder for you, but even more impressive that you’re able to get that fraud rate down so low.

Dorota Wróbel: I think that there is no marketplace in the world that isn’t at risk of attempts at fraud, right? In that area, g2a.com has a very good track record, with a marketplace fraud rate of 0.239% compared to the global average of 3.6. I think that the secret sauce in here is that from the beginning, we are a digital company, a pure digital company, only online. So we mastered, in protecting us from fraud attempts. While other actors of the e-commerce space have got mix sometimes offline, online omnichannel it’s much harder. We have got one g2a.com website that we need to protect, and this is something that we really care about. Cybersecurity technology has always on a big, prestigious place within our KPIs, and we are also a member of many organizations that search for and implement new security solutions like the Merchant Risk Council or cross-border e-commerce. Because of those efforts, we’ve been awarded with the most prestigious American CNP award, alongside with companies such as Microsoft, and Barclays Bank of First Data. And you also mentioned that we have got over 200 PSPs cooperating with us, meaning that we have always undergo audits with them. And this is also contributing to the high importance of the security of our marketplace.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah. When you have that many partners, it makes things even more important to keep everything safe. But it also reflects that clearly that many people trust you to be able to do it, and you have a track record of being able to. So, it’s definitely a big advantage. Let’s talk about the future for a few minutes as you’re the head of R&D, you spend a lot of time doing this, I’m sure. I saw it a couple of months ago. Now, at this point, at the end of the summer kind of range, you all had partnered with Binance to offer gift cards from them on your marketplace. And Binance is obviously big in the cryptocurrency space. Are cryptocurrencies a part of your payment infrastructure currently? And if they aren’t, what role do you kind of see them playing in the future of G2A? Because I think, as you alluded to earlier, a lot of the gaming products you’re selling, the gaming world, as I said in my introduction, is kind of on the bleeding edge of this new technology are some of the first to adopt things like cryptocurrencies. So what kind of role do those and what that partnership that you just signed, what does that have in store for the future of G2A?

Dorota Wróbel: We are actually looking into the blockchain and crypto technologies with great interest and trying to see where we can implement these technologies within our company because, as I said earlier, our users, they are early adopters. They like to try, they are online natives. So we have to always be like hand in hand with their needs. Right? When it comes to specifically, to transactions, in G2A that come is not involved in the cryptocurrency transactions in any way, nor does it weigh itself to possess such transactions we have got partners. But I think that this space is really interesting in the payments field because some people, they like actually changing the behavior of paying with the credit card, then paying by smartphone, then paying with the cryptocurrencies and so on. So we are just trying to not miss any trend and trying to be also with the consumer expectations, always on the same page with the customer’s needs. At the same time. It’s also really interesting to have all the SPS looking at this space. And some of them they are, big fans, some of them no. However, they always see it like another actor in the payment ecosystem. right? So you cannot ignore that field. It will be growing.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Certainly, Especially with I would imagine the buyer side of your marketplace skews a little bit younger as the whole kind of world of gaming does. So, it’s one of those things that with every person I talk to and bring up the topic of cryptocurrency or any new technology, Web3 related thing, kind of finding out, are they paying attention to the really youthful part of their audience, the ones that are leading the way or not? Because with how technology has changed in the last couple of decades, I’m in my mid-30s and I definitely feel way more out of touch than my parents did when they were in their mid-30s with like, what the heck are these kids using? What? How does this even work? But businesses and companies like yours are definitely going to have to stay at the very forefront of that to keep up with the needs and expectations as you said, of that consumer base. The last thing on this topic then, I know I also saw G2A announce Geek Verse. I believe it was called a new Web3 gaming marketplace. Can you explain what that is to me and kind of what the goals or plans are for entering into that world?

Dorota Wróbel: Yeah. Of course. Happy that you asked that question. G2A Geek Verse is actually focuses on ensuring outstanding quality and security. It makes it easier for gamers to discover quality new titles thanks to colorful content curation. And ensure, let’s say that each digital piece available there comes from a trusted developer and is of the highest standard. Our Long Tum plans for gig workers involve using blockchain technology to ensure the best user experience, which is still in many projects around the world. A bit lacking of and becoming an all-in-one hub for Web3 gaming, we observe also the trend that people from web tool they are training Web3 gaming, and we always looking at those trends and wanted to be part of them. And technology-wise, The next step includes also adding more supported blockchain to the hub and adding fiat payments, as well as offering aggregation and tools that will help our partners promote the offers and items on the giver’s platform.

Jacob Hollabaugh: It’s an amazing achievement just to get it launched and you’re definitely in my mind, in my opinion, in the right space, because those are the places that I think, as payments always are going to obviously be made in our world, millions and millions of them a day. But where they are made is going to potentially drastically change in the Web3 world is one of those spots where it’s a lot of the legacy infrastructure, a lot of the legacy financial everything systems aren’t going to necessarily just easily port over and in, and there’s going to be some companies left behind and some that are big winners. By getting in there early and understanding how are things made and how big the market already is, because a platform like Roblox, for instance, probably the biggest name in Web3 gaming, just surpassed 70 million daily active users. And I think to big financial institutions that have been around for 100 plus years, they would maybe not realize, like, wait a minute, there are 70 million people every day on just one of these platforms that are potentially making purchases, making little micro-transactions and everything. So it’s definitely the place to be. And you guys are on the front lines of the new stuff, just like you were at the beginning, seeing the move to digital a little earlier than others. So, Dorota, this has been a real pleasure for those listening who may want to learn more about G2A or take place buying or selling in the marketplace, where’s the best place for them to go to learn more about the company, learn more about yourself? Anything like that?

Dorota Wróbel: I think that g2a.Com, is the best place, especially before the Christmas time. Again, it’s always a good idea and within the wintertime. If you are looking for tips on how to spend your quality free time, then just visit our website and hopefully, you can find something that will meet your needs.

Jacob Hollabaugh: Yeah, love it. We will link to that and more in the show notes below. Thank you so much for your time and knowledge today. I’ve greatly enjoyed it and hope to speak again sometime soon.

Dorota Wróbel: Thank you very much.

Jacob Hollabaugh: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, head on over to soarpay.com/podcast to subscribe on your podcast listening platform of choice. That’s soarpay.com/podcast.