Trellis announced this week its demand-generation platform can now be integrated into Shopify stores.
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An Ottawa software company that helps online merchants drive traffic to their sites is now available to stores powered by Shopify in a move the fast-growing startup hopes will dramatically increase its addressable market.
Trellis announced this week its demand-generation platform can now be integrated into Shopify stores. The five-year-old startup’s software is already being used by hundreds of merchants who sell their wares on Amazon and Walmart’s e-commerce sites. Trellis’s founders say adding Shopify merchants to the mix will introduce their software to a wide spectrum of potential new customers.
“The phone’s been going crazy since the morning,” co-founder and CEO Fahim Sheikh said on Thursday afternoon. “It’s all about continuing the aggressive growth that we’ve seen and we continue to see.”
Using Trellis’s technology, online store owners can automatically adjust prices based on factors such as market demand, competitor pricing and consumer behaviour.
Sheikh says that helps merchants maximize profits and better manage their inventory by raising prices when demand for products is spiking, for example, or lowering prices if merchandise isn’t moving as fast as they’d like.
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.
With the addition of Shopify stores, Trellis will now be able to dig into a whole new set of consumer data and integrate that information into Amazon Marketing Cloud.
The firm says that will allow merchants to “unify customer insights across platforms, creating a more comprehensive view” of consumer buying patterns.
Stores can then use that data to create marketing campaigns aimed at specific consumer demographics in an effort to get more bang for their advertising buck, explained Trellis co-founder and chief product officer Krishna Vemulapali.
“It significantly improves (merchants’) ability to target shoppers and drive better ROI,” Vemulapali said.
Bringing Shopify stores on board promises to steepen an already impressive upward trajectory for Trellis, which topped OBJ’s 2024 list of Ottawa’s fastest-growing companies with three-year revenue growth of 963 per cent.
Rather than casting its net across the gamut of online merchants, the firm has begun zeroing in on higher-value, mid-enterprise customers that sell “fast-moving consumer goods,” Sheikh noted.
Earlier this year, Trellis added more horsepower to its sales engine by hiring former Amazon executive Luke McGinnis as its new chief chief revenue officer. McGinnis most recently served as vice-president of sales for Trellis’s biggest competitor, Seattle-based Pacvue.
McGinnis, who lives in the Seattle area, is among a handful of sales and marketing specialists the company has hired south of the border in 2024 as it looks to beef up market share in the U.S.
“Luke is just so well-connected in this industry,” Sheikh said. “He’s opening so many doors for us.”
The startup, which has raised several million dollars in seed funding, is in a “good spot” financially, he added, and is on track to become cash-flow-positive early next year.
In an effort to make its software even stickier with merchants, the firm is exploring ways to offer additional services such as enhanced demand-forecasting and promotion-planning capabilities.
“Our biggest challenge right now is growing the team fast enough while keeping the right culture in place,” Vemulapali said.
