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Trellis’s e-commerce merchandising platform shines on big stage in Vegas

March 15, 2023

Ottawa-based software firm — which now serves about 300 merchants who sell their wares on Amazon and Walmart’s e-commerce sites — made a big splash this week at the Prosper Show on Sin City’s famous strip.

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The thunderstorms that rolled into the Las Vegas area this week did nothing to dampen Fahim Sheikh’s spirits. The co-founder and CEO of Ottawa-based Trellis was in Sin City to drum up interest in his firm’s software at the Prosper Show, an annual conference for Amazon merchants and companies that make tools for businesses to generate more revenue on the global e-commerce platform. Despite the storm clouds, Sheikh said interest in Trellis’s products – which are designed to drive more traffic to online merchants – was heating up. “The feedback at the show has been amazing,” Sheikh said Wednesday morning before heading back to the exhibits at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on Vegas’s famed strip. “We have our competitors coming over, bringing over their CEOs and saying, ‘This is the best product at the show this year.’ We’re super pumped.” It’s a bit of a coming-out party for Trellis, which Sheikh launched in 2019 with fellow Ottawa tech gurus Denis Leclair and Krishna Vemulapali. The company now serves about 300 merchants who sell their wares on Amazon and Walmart’s e-commerce sites. Trellis’s software continuously tracks key sales metrics in real time to give customers a clearer picture of how well their merchandising campaigns are working. In a bid to boost sales, for example, merchants on sites like Amazon often pay for “sponsored” status, meaning the products will appear at the top of the page when consumers enter particular keywords. To earn a sponsored position, merchants bid on words and phrases that are most likely to entice shoppers to click on their products. Trellis’s algorithms tap into sales data from Amazon and other e-commerce sites to determine which keywords are likely to generate the most clicks and sales for merchants. The software then calculates and submits bids based on those results. The product seems to be catching on. Trellis’s annual recurring revenues rose 200 per cent in 2022 after growing 500 per cent the previous year. Over the past several months, the Ottawa firm has been busily adding new features to its software that use artificial intelligence to track what Sheikh refers to as the four Ps of e-commerce merchandising – product content, price, placement of advertising and promotion – and predict how each element will affect the others. Sheikh says merchants know through experience that lowering the price of an item will likely drive up sales and boost marketing campaign conversion rates. Trellis uses the power of big-data analytics to automatically adjust prices based on demand to help online sellers “make smarter decisions to drive more profitable growth,” he explains. The platform also does “scenario planning,” simulations that offer real-time projections of exactly how much sales of an item could be expected to rise or fall depending on how much prices are raised or lowered. The company has developed a metric it coined “return on merchandise spend” that crunches real time sales, pricing and product placement data to measure what kind of bang online sellers are getting for their marketing buck. “No one has really adapted (the four Ps) for e-commerce and put that in one platform,” Sheikh says. “That’s really what we’ve done.” Trellis now has 22 employees in Canada and about 15 contractors overseas. The company, which has raised $2.5 million in seed capital, is hoping to close a larger series-A round next spring as it pursues partnerships with retailers like Home Depot, Overstock.com and Target to work with merchants on those platforms. Noting that many online merchants still rely on data that’s been manually entered into spreadsheets and other financial tools to make sales forecasts, Sheikh sees a captive market for the software. He says there are currently about three million merchants on Amazon alone and figures half a million of those would be a good fit for Trellis’s platform – meaning the company still has plenty of ground to conquer. “For us, it’s all about how do we bring more of those sellers on to our platform and continue to grow at the pace that we’ve been growing,” Sheikh says.