E-commerce startups

Four businesses sharing one word

E-commerce on this site means four fairly different things, and the hub is easier to read once they are separated: the software underneath a store, the tooling that lifts conversion once a shopper arrives, the brands doing the selling, and the marketplaces trying to route demand away from Amazon.

The layer underneath the store

Violet is a unified API connecting merchants to whatever channel wants to sell their goods. Shoppable does something similar at the checkout, and Uvodo bundles the whole thing for businesses starting from nothing. Candid Wholesale takes the same idea into B2B apparel, and PrintKK removes inventory from the equation entirely.

Conversion is where the money is spent

Once traffic exists, a second cluster fights over what happens next. Behamics is the clearest statement of the problem - it works on cart abandonment and returns explicitly without discounting. Dialogue and Storyly personalise the storefront, Customily personalises the product, and Wisp brings a notification inbox to the store itself.

Fit, because returns are the real cost

Selling clothing online means paying for everything that comes back. iModel shows garments on bodies shaped like the shopper's. Mys Tyler serves body-relevant recommendations, mirrARme puts the garment on the shopper in AR, and Dressarte sidesteps the problem by making the clothes to order.

The anti-Amazon cluster

A surprising number of these companies exist to answer one competitor. Trellus arms local shops with delivery. Vendazzo and BuyLocal work on discovery, My Community Made removes the fees, and Blistey focuses discovery on Black, Asian, Latinx and Indigenous-owned businesses.

And the brands themselves

The direct-to-consumer brands here are worth reading as case studies in distribution rather than as products. Saatva is the oldest of them and the template for much of what followed. Cullen Jewellery built a fast-growing jeweller entirely on lab-grown stones, and Xena Workwear found a category - safety footwear for women - that the incumbents had simply not made.