ecommerce

TrackIf, Led By Doug Berg, Raises $5M Series A

August 18, 2015 By Graeme Thickins

Three-time Minnesota entrepreneur Doug Berg announced today that his latest startup, TrackIf, has raised a $5 million Series A financing round, co-led by Origin Ventures and Grotech Ventures. Existing investor Chicago Ventures also participated.

TrackIf has developed a technology that allows transactional sites and mobile apps to add white-labeled product tracking, which captures future purchase intent and converts it into revenue using personalized email alerts. The company says several of the largest online retailers in the world already rely on TrackIf to maximize revenue per customer. The company is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN with key executives in both San Francisco and New York.

Origin Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm founded in 1999. It is based in Chicago and composed entirely of former operators and engineers. The firm invests in emerging software, marketplace, and content companies capable of exponential growth. Previous investments include Grubhub (NYSE:GRUB), DialogTech, Ahalogy, and Windsor Circle. CrunchBase says it has made 32 investments in 20 companies, and is currently investing out of its third fund. Its exits include one IPO and one acquisition.

Grotech Ventures is a early investor in high-potential technology companies. Founded in 1984, it’s headquartered in Vienna, VA. It seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the IT landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.3 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting at $500,000. CrunchBase reports it has made 77 investments in 54 companies, and its exits include one IPO and nine acquisitions.

The news release follows:

TrackIf Raises $5 Million To Fuel Its Growing Customer Centric Marketing & E-Commerce Solutions

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – TrackIf, a leader in online tracking and intelligent alerting for future purchase intent, today announced it has raised a $5 million Series A financing round, co-led by Origin Ventures and Grotech Ventures. Existing investor Chicago Ventures also participated.

TrackIf is an embeddable technology in leading e-commerce sites and mobile apps that, for the first time, gives shoppers options when they cannot or will not buy on their first visit to a site. With TrackIf’s white label technology, e-commerce companies can capture future consumer purchase intent and convert it into newfound revenue by sending personalized email alerts on changes such as price drops, new items and items coming back in stock.

TrackIf’s initial retail customers have seen tremendous results, with some capturing as much as $1 million in future purchase intent per day from their online visitors. TrackIf has sent over 65 million personalized emails to date, with nearly 50x better open rates and 20x greater conversion rates– results rarely seen with even the best retargeting campaigns.

TrackIf’s customers include several of the top 25 Internet retailers (including the largest home improvement retailer), Neiman Marcus (Last Call), Build.com, Cost Plus World Market, Joie, and many others.

Trackif integrates easily into e-commerce sites by installing a simple script which gives shoppers the ability to opt-in to get alerts on specific products, categories, or areas of any site. This means even the largest sites can deploy this capability quickly with very little integration and provide Pinterest-like capabilities that are branded to any site.

Among the tracking and alerting capabilities that TrackIf retail customers have deployed are:

Price Drops (on customer-specified products)
Product Availability (in/out of stock + limited quantities)
New Products Added (by category, brand, size, color, other)
New Reviews Added
Gift Registry Tracking (wedding, baby, graduate)
Favorite Products (Pinterest-like wish list with alerting)
Wish List Alerting (On existing wish lists within any site)

“We’re in a Pinterest economy now, where consumers want to pick and choose the products they want, from the sites they want, at the prices they want. Shopping sites that embed this type of experience into their sites will not only delight their customers, but can multiply their results,” said Doug Berg, CEO and Founder of TrackIf.

When successfully deployed, the TrackIf solution enhances retailers’ CRM systems, which traditionally are limited to only tracking what consumers have purchased in the past. TrackIf adds the capability to compile and act on data that signals what large groups of shoppers are going to buy in the future. Many TrackIf customers have altered their fulfillment and reordering processes as a result of the new demand intelligence they get from TrackIf’s products.

“TrackIf has impressive growth in this new category of customer-centric marketing. Many of the world’s most respected online retailers are getting instant results with measurable ROI,” said Jason Heltzer, Partner at Origin Ventures. “We believe this new category of marketing will be a must-have capability for any transactional site or mobile app that wants to personalize the consumer experience and maximize revenue-per-customer.”

As a part of the financing, Jason Heltzer from Origin Ventures and Lawson DeVries from Grotech Ventures will join the Board of Directors at TrackIf.

About Trackif

TrackIf is the leader in online tracking and intelligent alerting. Its technology empowers transactional sites and mobile apps to add white-labeled product tracking that captures future purchase intent and converts it into revenue using personalized email alerts. Several of the largest online retailers in the world rely on TrackIf to maximize revenue per customer. To date, TrackIf has sent over 65 million personalized emails, with nearly 50x better open rates and 20x greater conversion rates– results rarely seen with even the best retargeting campaigns. TrackIf is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN with key executives in both San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY.

About Origin Ventures

Origin Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm founded in 1999, based in Chicago and composed entirely of former operators and engineers. The firm invests in emerging software, marketplace, and content companies capable of exponential growth. Previous investments include Grubhub (NYSE:GRUB), DialogTech, Ahalogy, and Windsor Circle.

About Grotech Ventures

Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures is a leading early investor in high-potential technology companies. Grotech seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the IT landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.3 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting at $500,000.

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SPS Commerce Says Retail Industry Is In Denial

April 30, 2015 By Graeme Thickins

Retailers still don’t appear to be facing the profound changes their industry is undergoing, according to Peter Zaballos, VP of marketing and product at Minneapolis’ SPS Commerce, in a keynote he gave yesterday at the company’s annual “omnichannel” conference, called In:fluence15.

“It’s not just about ‘the Amazon effect’,” he said. “It’s about digital engagement.” He noted that, although ecommerce today totals $300 billion, a 10% slice of the overall $3 trillion of retail spending, that’s far from the whole picture. “The real story is that 50% of total retail purchases are influenced by the web.” He said retailers need to be creating digital experiences that bring consumers into the store. “Digital influence is $1.4 trillion of retailing!” Zaballos declared.

He cited other surprising findings published in the company’s 2015 Retail Insights Report. (Some shown below in one of my photos from the event.) The one stat that really amazed him, however, was that 52% of those surveyed gave “Other” as their reason for not making progress in omnichannel strategies. “Are you kidding me — what is that?” Zaballos asked, questioning where retailers priorities should be. He concludes that “Other” must really be about distractions. One fact he feels contributes to that is a need for better technology practices. For example, “the retail industry is still relying on spreadsheets, a 30-year old technology” — one prone to inaccuracies, of course, with so many people often working on a given file.

Some other surprising facts Zaballos cited from recent research findings:
• Consumers spend 76% more in store when they’re engaged on mobile.
• And 49% of online purchases today begin on Pinterest.

Nearing the end of his keynote, Zaballos spoke about “item-centric architecture,” a key focus for SPS Commerce. (More on that here.) “The item is the new foundation,” he said. “We’re reinventing everything in retail around that,” noting that it’s been three years since SPS Commerce began this initiative.

He challenged the audience of retailers by saying they need to:
• Prioritize and focus on omnichannel strategies.
• Collaborate with partners. “Ask yourself, who can help me with this?”
• And just get started, “when you find that thing that is most broken.”

Zaballos closed his keynote by saying, “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year transformation. This is the year the industry goes beyond ‘Other’.”

Concurrent with the conference, SPS Commerce made two news announcements. In the first, the company unveiled the SPS Commerce Platform, a cloud-based offering that offers a more agile and collaborative foundation for critical omnichannel solutions, including analytics, assortment, fulfillment, and sourcing. More than 400 global partners have teamed with SPS to deliver value-added solutions using the SPS Commerce Platform. In the second announcement, it introduced an offering called Collaboration Analytics, which delivers accessible, responsive, and intuitive analytics powering the collaborative decision-making required to meet consumers’ expectations.