The coronavirus pandemic has opened new gates for online stores and platforms as they aim to capitalize on the online spending boom and at the same time give shoppers a great online shopping experience. Here comes into the picture Nacelle, which aims to increase conversion rates, increase average order value, and handle spikes in traffic to delight its customers with a faster and unique shopping experience.
Nacelle, which is an LA-based startup in the burgeoning “headless” e-commerce space, bills itself as a JAMstack for e-commerce, offering a developer platform that delivers greater penetration and visual experience with scalability to online store platforms.
Led by Index Ventures and Accomplic, it has raised about $48 million to date in funding. The other angel investors list include Shopify’s Jamie Sutton, Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki, and Attentive CEO Brian Long.
Nacelle is building a smoother path for e-commerce brands to conveniently adapt a headless structure. Headless web apps essentially focus on the premise that a site’s frontend is decoupled from the backend infrastructure, so it’s leaning fully on dedicated frameworks for each to deliver the final content to its end users. There intrinsic benefits for sites going headless include greater performance, better scalability, leaner hosting costs, and a more systematic and dedicated developer experience. For e-commerce sites, there are also some notable complexities due to how storefronts operate and how headless CMSs need to take care of its dynamic inventories and user shopping needs.
CEO Brian Anderson informs TechCrunch “We asked how do you pair a very dynamic requirement with the generally static system that JAMstack offers, and that’s where Nacelle comes in.” Anderson previously operated a technical agency for Shopify Plus customers building custom storefronts, a venture that has led to a major traffic increase of its customers. Kelsey Burnes has been hired as this startup’s first VP of marketing from the e-commerce plug-in platform Nosto.
Although Anderson described a host of benefits pertaining to Nacelle’s platform, yet many are the result of reduced reaction time that he said converts more users and pushes them towards spending more.
The company has a particular eye on mobile storefronts, with Anderson noting that most desktop storefronts end up dramatically outperforming mobile counterparts and that the speedier load times, Nacelle enables on mobile can do a lot to overcome this.
In the coming times, more brands are embracing headless structures, Nacelle is aiming to manage the experience. Nacelle is optimized for Shopify users to get up and running fast and efficiently. Users can also easily integrate the system with popular CMSs like Contentful and Sanity. In totality, Nacelle sports integrations for more than 30 services which include SMS marketing platforms, analytics platforms, payment platforms, and more. The ultimate objective is to minimize the need for users to alleviate data or learn new workflows.
The company is aiming its guns at direct-to-consumer brands pretty with full thrust. Some of the company’s early customers include D2C bedding startup Boll & Branch, cozy things marketplace Barefoot Dreams, and Something Navy, a popular fashion brand. The majority of Nacelle’s rollouts launch later this summer. Last month, Nacelle went live with men’s toiletries startup Ballsy and claims that the conversions at storefront have seen a whopping jump of 28%
Nacelle is not the only new entrant on the block, as just last month Commerce Layer announced that it had given further ignition to market by raising $6 million in funding from Benchmark.
