Welcoming Malomo to Base10
Shopping online can be a strange rollercoaster; you get excited about an Instagram ad that snuck onto your feed at just the right time. Add to cart. You autofill your way through the checkout process and get that email receipt letting you know you’ll get a tracking number once your order ships. That’s where your interaction with the brand usually ends and your experience with the carrier’s website begins.
If you’ve ever had to struggle copying and pasting a tracking number, type in a 20-digit tracking ID by hand, realize you’re on the USPS website when your package is actually with UPS, or even refresh the page a thousand times because that tracking history just won’t update, you know that this experience can be less than ideal. Plus, for brands, these frustrating customer experiences mean merchants get a bunch of emails, phone calls, chats, tweets, etc. from customers looking for minute-by-minute updates on the whereabouts of their latest order.
Malomo is changing all that, turning the shipment tracking experience into a marketing opportunity for merchants. When you buy from a brand that uses Malomo, instead of a clunky tracking page that is anything but user friendly, you get a branded web page that shows you everything from the location of your package to shipping FAQs, new arrivals, and quick access to customer support if you need it. For customers, this is the easiest way to track a package with an effortless interface that tells you exactly what you need to know. For brands and merchants, this improved experience means less customers inundating their help desks with “where is my package?” inquiries — up to 75% fewer inquiries, in fact. With Malomo, brands have full control over the look and feel of their shipping notification emails and tracking pages, and can even A/B test certain modules and widgets on these landing pages.
Shopify alone is now home to over 1.5 million stores, all of which need to keep customers informed on the status of their online orders. And customers really want to know what’s going on with their latest purchase; on average, customers check the shipment tracking page on logistics websites 3.6 times between when they receive that tracking number via email and when the package arrives at their door. This is an incredible — and largely untapped — opportunity for brands to add in more customer touch points and generate more impressions. That means if a brand ships 10,000 orders, they could be missing out on an upwards of 36,000 impressions from those orders alone. As of today, Malomo has tracked over 4 million packages for brands including Rhone, Summersalt, Magic Spoon, and For Love & Lemons.
“When e-commerce merchants hear the word ‘shipping’, they immediately think ‘headache and cost-center.’ But shipping is actually a hidden growth opportunity,” Yaw, founder and CEO of Malomo, told us. “With Malomo, we’re helping merchants connect with customers when they’re most excited to hear from them. We’ve turned shipping into a high-performance marketing channel that’s driving millions of dollars in repeat revenue.”
We’ve seen plenty of software companies rapidly growing their businesses on Shopify before diversifying revenue streams to other e-commerce platforms and go-to-market models, including agency referrals, direct sales, or in the case of Malomo, through extensive partnerships with related e-commerce companies.
Malomo is leveraging two of the primary go-to-market strategies we see for apps on the Shopify store. They’ve managed to build partnerships with some of the bigger names on the Shopify app store, including Klaviyo, the leading e-commerce email marketing platform.
Yaw and his co-founder Anthony have been in the e-commerce ecosystem for years and have done a superb job building connections with folks at Klaviyo, Privy, Omnisend, and Recharge. Plus, founders and investors from these companies joined us in this round. We see ecosystem partnerships as another massive and clever go-to-market strategy that’s working well in the e-commerce space. From partnering with ecosystem brands to bringing in strategic angel investors to participate in this round, it’s clear that what Yaw and the team are building with Malomo is loved in the e-commerce realm.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Ben Jabbawy (Founder & CEO of Privy), Jamie Sutton (former head of technology partnerships at Shopify Plus), Dylan Whitman (former CEO of BVC Commerce), and the rest of the Malomo investor syndicate on this Series Seed. Welcome Yaw and the entire Malomo team to the Base10 family.
Base10 is a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm investing in Automation for the Real Economy. Founded by Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, the firm invests in technology companies that are bringing automation to sectors of the Real Economy, including industrial logistics, consumer logistics, restaurants, financial services, and sales & customer service. Portfolio companies include ThePillClub, Virtual Kitchen Company, Acquire, PopMenu, and others.
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