The Hospitality industry’s most advanced digital marketplace
Ezilinx is the result of more than 50 years of experience in the hospitality industry coupled with 22 years of industry consultation.
Founder Jeff Dunstan was born and raised in a hotel. He is a third-generation liquor retailer, with a family legacy reaching back to 1914, when his grandfather ran the Denver City Hotel in Coolgardie. Jeff became a manager in his father’s hotel at the age of 18 before purchasing his first liquor store when he was 23.
Jeff went on to become one of the founders of WA Wine Week, launching the event just as Margaret River wineries were releasing their first vintages and attracting then Premier Sir Charles Court to award the first People’s Choice Gold Medal award.
In 1996, Jeff was at a luncheon in Sydney where guest speaker Bill Gates spoke about “this thing called the Internet”. It was an eye-opening moment for Jeff, inspiring him to build a platform specifically for the hospitality industry.
After a couple of false starts, Jeff took his idea to Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) and the HOTS ecommerce platform was born, the same year Amazon began selling books. HOTS, the first B2B platform in Australia, was subsequently purchased by a mining company which steered it into mining industry uses.
Jeff moved on to developing a web site promoting WA wine makers with wine journalist Ray Jordan, now Ezilinx’s Executive Director, and his new team undertook extensive consultation with the hospitality industry to identify what they needed in a digital platform.
With consumer demand expanding into multiple products and more purchasing products online, it was clear business was being taken away from bricks and mortar bottle shops. The adoption by most distributors of their own B2B technology had also created a problem for producers and retailers.
Key industry requirements for a new platform included:
- enabling connectivity and having a virtual marketplace that offered every hospitality product, not just beer, wine and spirits;
- a database with contacts for every licensee in Australia and New Zealand;
- being able to also offer full communication and transaction through the allocation of a purpose-built virtual office for every seller and buyer;
- a communication and marketing hub with fully integrated Cisco technology; and
- an alliance with a merchant bank for invoice payments.
Taking these needs into account, Ezinlinx, the hospitality industry’s most advanced digital platform, was launched in May 2021.
