If you ever thought about the e-commerce market and where it is right now, you must have seen that there are players like Amazon, Walmart and others and then there are smaller e-commerce players who run their own stores which can either be based on Shopify or WooCommerce or other platforms. However, did you ever think about the fact that there are not many players in the market related to e-commerce who provide a complete solution for e-commerce owners to manage everything at a single place. Right now, Shopify is one of the biggest platforms for e-commerce and that is all thanks to the options that they provide.
However, there are not many who can claim that they are competing with Shopify right now and that is a real problem. Now, a startup named Staytuned Digital is building what it claims to be the “Salesforce Suite for E-Commerce” and they have raised a new round of equity and debt funding of $34 Million already. The founders say that “E-commerce has completely shifted and is moving to these emerging platforms, with Shopify being the biggest one,”. “In turn, we’re buying and building software that’s around the Shopify ecosystem.”
Staytuned Digital’s CEO Kassardjian said, “Software is super high-margin and it grows faster than Shopify, while Shopify grows faster than the e-commerce ecosystem,”. “So if we buy and build enough software, we can have the largest hub of brands and merchants using the software, which is going to drive e-commerce in the future.” The current plan for the company is to acquire as many apps as possible that are focused around the Shopify ecosystem and integrate them on its own platform so that its customers can take advantage of the same and this means that the platform can get bigger and bigger with each passing day. He also adds that the new funding will let them hire more engineers and help them scale faster as well which is a challenge for bootstrapped companies that have less money to spend. Staytuned was originally a company that focused on video in 2019 but have since made a “hard pivot” to focus on e-commerce now.
