Meet Saleor, the commerce API that puts developers first
By Patrick Mayr and Filip Dames
E-commerce has been subject to a large degree of change over the course of the last year. While e-commerce as a percentage of total retail sales has been on an undeterred upward trajectory since the turn of the millenium, the pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated the inevitable. A decade’s worth of progress was brought forward as e-commerce penetration jumped from 16% to 27% in the two months following the onset of the pandemic.
We’ve all seen the figure below:
The online presence of brands is no longer just a supporting function to their offline presence, but becoming the main venue through which brands engage with their customers. This shift has given rise to a generation of entrepreneurs looking for tools that enable them to build best-in-class online experiences for their customers.
Buy vs. build as the original dilemma
Looking back to 2008 when Zalando got started, the availability of software to build online shopping experiences with was limited. The few that were in the market were extremely difficult to integrate and business leaders were calling the shots on what to use. We started building on Magento, but as the order volume exponentially grew, it became immediately apparent that Magento couldn’t scale with us. After scouring the market, we couldn’t find any alternatives. So, we made the decision to build our own infrastructure in 2010.
But, today, both the landscape of tools and the key decision makers on the subject within brands have fundamentally changed.
The era of the developer
Over the last 10 to 15 years, the roles of software and developers within companies have substantially evolved. Software, which was previously reserved largely for the automation of back office functions, has become the defining fabric of companies today. With this rising importance of software, developers have grown into influential figures as the builders and decision makers within companies of all stripes. As a result, we are seeing the creation of a plethora of tools that make developers’ lives easier and, by extension, their businesses better.
An important tool for developers are application programming interfaces (APIs), which function as legos that allow developers to piece together their products from third-party software without having to build everything themselves. API-first businesses are percolating into every industry and changing the way software is being built.
And retail is no exception to the influence of APIs.
As consumer expectations — think faster service and more aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-navigate interfaces — of online shopping rise and an ever increasing share of sales are transacted on mobile devices, the need for brands to adapt to the latest technologies is clear. Still today, the majority of brands continue to run their online presences on monolithic platforms that were constructed during a time when 100% of purchases were conducted on desktops. These monoliths come with baked-in constraints, making it incredibly difficult for developers to build new consumer experiences and innovate.
APIs provide developers with a new paradigm of building online shopping experiences. Instead of being limited by the constraints of a particular platform, developers have the flexibility to construct their online shop as they so choose. Companies no longer need to make the choice between building everything from scratch or opting in to a large platform. APIs allow them to leverage existing software when building their own experiences.
Meet the commerce API that puts developers first
Saleor is developing an open source and API-first CMS for e-commerce shops.
The Saleor API can be thought of as the back end of a shop, which handles all the core e-commerce functionalities like transactions, inventory management, product information management. From there, developers can choose which front end to layer on top, which payment methods to offer, what additional back-end services to connect to, and much more.
In line with the company’s developer-first approach, Saleor’s API is also open source. Developers can navigate to their GitHub repository to download the software and start using it for their online shop. The team is also building an enterprise grade version with hosting features that enable larger companies to use the product.
Our investment in Saleor
The combination of retail increasingly moving online and developers as the driving force within companies has created the perfect storm for Saleor. Brands need to think of their digital presence as a first priority and their developers as driving product choices.
Today, we are announcing that Cherry is leading a $2.5 million seed round into Saleor with participation from a number of notable angels, including Vercel CEO and Next.js author Guillermo Rauch and Chris Schagen, former CMO of Contentful. The investment will help them to continue to build their team (they’re hiring) in Europe and North America as well as to further develop the open source API and its enterprise offering.
Founded by Mirek and Patryk, two Polish developers, the company truly embodies a developer-first ethos. We were immediately drawn to their high degree of user empathy and relentless execution — the combination of which is needed to build a commercial open source company. With Saleor, the team has built one of the fastest growing and most vibrant open source communities, which will remain the heart of the company.
We could not be more excited to partner with this incredible team on their mission to enable developers to build the modern generation of e-commerce experiences.
You can read more about the founders, company story, and product in a TechCrunch exclusive by Steve O’Hear 👉 Saleor scores $2.5M seed round for its ‘headless’ e-commerce platform
