We are very proud at Bizimply to be a part of the 500 Startup community and have really appreciated their continuous support. For readers who don’t already know, 500 Startups is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai in 2010.
For this blog post, we decided to take a look at our fellow 500 Startup companies who help retail organisations to solve issues that they tackle on a daily basis. As you can imagine, there are a lot of companies that are in the 500 startup community so it was quite difficult to narrow it down to just eight. It took us a while but we got there in the end! Here are our favourites, we hope you enjoy reading!
Eight 500 Startups Companies Impacting The Retail Industry
Storefront
Storefront provides pop-up shops to help retailers to build their brand, create awareness and increase sales. They have pop-up shops available throughout the world so all you need to do is choose a location, find a space that meets your needs and then launch it with the help of Storefront. Don’t worry if you find it hard to find the right space, Storefront will provide you with a personal concierge to assist you!
Key features:
- Temporary rental areas with high foot traffic
- World class customer service
- Easy and secure payments and insurance coverage
- Booking a pop-up store is as easy as booking a hotel room
StoreHub
Founded in 2013, StoreHub is an iPad POS system which helps you to run your business at your fingertips. Their POS system gives you valuable insights into your best selling products through real-time reports and tells you which items are underperforming to free up your cash flow. Another great feature it has is automatic low stock alerts to ensure you never run out of your top sellers.
Key features:
- Real-time reporting
- Manage your supplier relationships
- Track buyer activity
- Never run out of your bestselling items
Brandtrack
Brandtrack is a company which allows you to customise the music you play in your stores to match your brand characteristics and customer profile. They have a team of expert music professionals who select the songs that best apply to your preferred in-store emotional experience. All you have to do is download and install the app, play the music and control it! You can even include advertisements in your playlists to promote products.
Key features:
- Download any playlist and listen offline
- Music by day time
- More than 30 hours of music with no cuts
- Custom playlists
Rover
Founded by Sean Rucker and John Coombs, Rover has a platform which features a full suite of tools allowing you to drive mobile engagement and monetization using location.  Rover makes it easy to manage all of your beacons, geofences and configurations. With features like beacon grouping, fast search, bulk editing and smart tagging, it’s easy to manage your location infrastructure at scale. With their app, they make it easy to send location-triggered, scheduled and instant messages so you can target your customers at the right time and place.
Key features:
- Manage location infrastructure
- Richer mobile messaging
- Highly targeted, smart campaigns
- Track performance
TurnStyle
Founded by Devon Wright and Chris Gilpin, TurnStyle is a Wi-Fi marketing platform that allows brands and marketers to connect with their customers, resulting in increased sales, loyalty and insights into consumer behaviour. The customer just needs to connect to your Wifi hotspot and is then redirected to your log-in page where they can join via their social media profile, phone number or email. Retailers can then send real-time messages, rewards and coupons directly to customer’s phones without them needing to download an app.
Key features:
- Track email opens, click-through rate and coupon redemption rates through the Turnstyle dashboard.
- Very easy to use with no technical background required.
- Compare data across multiple venues and timeframes.
- Access to metrics e.g. overall foot traffic, new visitors, returning visitors.
Wiser
Wiser gives retailers up-to-date information on pricing to help you to sell the right product, at the right time, at the right price. You can monitor your competitors’ prices so that you can always stay one step ahead and offer your customers better deals.  It allows you to make better decisions faster by visualising the impact of pricing changes and quickly gain insight into changes in key metrics like revenue, conversion rate, profitability, and more.
Key features:
- Stay ahead of the competition
- A/B test your pricing strategy
- Price faster and smarter
- Visualise actionable insights in real-time
fulfil.io
fulfil.io allows your customers to shop for your products from any platform, whether they wish to shop in store, on Amazon, eBay or wherever the case may be. You as a retailer can then manage all of these orders from one platform, making packaging and shipping a seamless process. Once an order comes through, fulfil.io will automatically update the inventory levels on every channel.
Key features:
- Omni-Channel order management
- Inventory and warehouse management
- Simplify your purchasing and receiving processes
- Drop shipping – without the stress
Venzee
Founded by Kate Hiscox, Marco Sylvestre and Xin Huang, Venzee is a company which enables suppliers and manufacturers to update their product information and then immediately notify you, as the retailer of the changes they have made. They provide a quality scoring which encourages vendors to improve the product information they send you. They also have system friendly imports for vendors to adapt their information to meet the retailers’ requirements.
Key features:
- Increased speed to market
- Content rich and error-free
- Images that meet your requirements
- System friendly imports for vendors
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, Bizimply is also part of the 500 Startup community. To learn more about Bizimply and how we can help your business, click here to access your free demo.
