The global e-commerce market is expected to grow by $10.87 trillion during 2021-2025, with a CAGR of 29%. Nearly $1.3T is spent globally by those ecommerce stores to drive site traffic. But, only 3% of site traffic actually converts to buying something. As more and more businesses move online, the number one thing on all of their minds is how to increase this conversion rate.

It’s virtually impossible for the average ecommerce store to keep up with all the ever-changing updates their website requires to give site visitors the experience they need to click that purchase button. We believe 7 out of the 10 top reasons site visitors don’t convert can be fixed by automating website updates.

Because is setting out to generate +$2.4T in new revenue opportunity globally for ecommerce stores by driving an average +38% add to cart rate increase.

From inventory and availability updates on every single product (made worse by COVID delays), to shipping times and cost estimates. To frequently changing promotions, BOGOs, and offers, to upsells and product recommendations, to reviews and rewards offers. To payment methods, return policies, product details, and benefits like sustainability info or how it’s made, and everything else in between...the average Ecommerce Manager has a lot on their hands to keep site visitors moving through to purchase. The smallest missing or inaccurate information can cause site visitors to immediately halt their buying process.

From static to dynamic content

I launched Because, in November 2020, but I got my first lesson in entrepreneurship at 7 years old😅 from my multi-time entrepreneur dad. I went on to win the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for my house painting business at 18 while studying at Babson College and then worked in Sales at multiple marketing technology SaaS startups before moving on to start Because during my first year out of college. I started the company in Boston and am now growing it out of Tampa, with global team members in 6 different countries.

The reason I started Because was to help manage all of these frequently changing content types on ecommerce websites - I thought they should be “dynamic” - they should update based on a set of logic and data. Instead, almost all website content today is “static.” Every time Ecommerce Managers want to make an update on their product pages, they have to go into each page manually to make the edit or call up their developer (typically outsourced) to get their (expensive) help.

After doing over 100 problem interviews (following the Running Lean framework), we uncovered what ultimately became Because. The problem wasn’t just about editing site content. The problem was about updating site content.

Along with Engineer, Stef, we focused on customers with high volumes of ever-changing site content with a resource-strapped, non-technical team (most ecommerce teams today). High-sku stores- merchants that sell hundreds or thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of products became a sweet spot for our early customer base. In Shopify alone, there are over 700,000 merchants with over 50 products to manage. All with thousands of different types of content that need to change monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, or even by the minute.

These frequent manual website updates due to their static nature waste anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours per month and thousands and thousands of dollars (think $50/hour per marketer or developer making updates). Multiply that by 24 million ecommerce stores globally and you have 28 Billion wasted hours and $1.4 Trillion wasted spent.

Increase add to cart rate by +38% with Because

Because is coming off of a $3 million Seed led by Harlem Capital. We offer a no-code solution for Ecommerce Managers to design website content (through the form of plain text, descriptions, alerts, banners, top bars, pop ups, etc.) in a Canva-inspired editor experience. From there, users can set their own automation rules to publish conversion messages across different website pages at scale, all with logic on when it should show.

Users can set display rules like product tags, collection, price, weight, vendor, etc. to drive frequent and automatic updates of not only the content itself (inventory status for example), but where the content shows (only on products > $50 in price), and when it shows (only to site visitors with red sneakers in their cart).

We've introduced features like Playbooks and A/B testing to help users make decisions about the most effective content for their site. We are also building out benchmarking and AI suggestions for merchants to compare their results (clicks, add to cart rate, conversion rate, revenue, etc.) against other stores in similar industries, geographies, price points, etc. and put content decision-making on auto-pilot.

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Millennials take on the big, clunky PIM

We are using this new Seed funding to disrupt the age-old PIM (product information management) industry. Leaders in the PIM space like Hybris, Salsify, and Akeneo, serve a similar customer base to us in that they help manage high volumes of product data, but they focus more on “cold data” - like price, title, description, product image, etc. Their sweet spot is on maintaining integrity across these data points on multi-channel (brand website, Amazon, Walmart, etc.).

There’s still this massive overlooked problem that the PIMs have missed on the owned brand site itself for smaller, faster moving ecommerce stores. A lot of our customers don’t even know what a PIM is, let alone would they use one, considering how clunky they are for what they truly need. Alternatively, we’re entering the market with a ridiculously easy-to-use interface and experience that’s actually fun for the user- think Canva, but for ecommerce.

We’re just getting started

Last year we raised a $650K angel round and have grown to over 900 merchants using Because. We are excited to be looking toward the future and fuel massive product and team growth as we build out integrations to all the other major ecommerce platforms. We also are planning to integrate with other key tools to fuel a more powerful logic-based rules engine - to common platforms, we all know, like Klaviyo, Smile.io, ShipBob, and tons more.

If you want to make an impact in the ecommerce ecosystem with us – we'd love to have you join us. We are on the search for team members across Sales, Marketing, & Engineering.

Together, we’re going to build the presentation layer of ecommerce data. Automation unlocked.

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