Navigating the expansion of e-commerce
storefronts often involves considering expensive technology alternatives.
However, merchants frequently overlook more cost-effective and efficient
options already present in their tech stack.
Krepling, an e-commerce
platform, is one such solution designed for mid-market merchants who want
greater control over their tools and workflows. Projections indicate that
e-commerce sales will reach $8.1 trillion by 2026. New platforms like Krepling
simplify the scaling process for online businesses.
Krepling is a no-code platform for
merchants to contribute to building and maintaining increasingly complex
ecosystems across the tech stack.
The company works with over 600 merchants worldwide in more than
35 countries. These firms can choose the integrations they need without coding
experience, making the process seamless.
Incorporated in 2020, the software developer employs a team of
10 to operate the company, co-founded by Liam Gerada and his brother Travis.
They launched a retail startup about four years ago, eventually leading them to
start Krepling.
“It was through that journey that we discovered that e-commerce
had evolved to a lot more than simply selling through a website. We found that
today e-commerce is very much the construct of a merchant’s own making, which
often involves complex payment flows, leveraging a multitude of different
integration services and automation from across the entire web,” Liam told The
E-Commerce Times.
The Gerada brothers fashioned their technology entirely
in-house. That could evolve into an open-source transition as they leverage
more or less modular stack. But right now, it is completely proprietary
software, he noted.
Meeting Vendor
Expansion Needs
Merchants are expanding their tech stack in order to optimize
for cost to reach more consumers across different channels like email and SMS,
according to Gerada. The two brothers found that the current e-commerce
landscape neither provided nor incentivized the level of flexibility merchants
require.
In many instances, the basics were missing. Sometimes, even just
automated marketing or the ability to recover abandoned carts was not what
their online systems could handle.
“We found that e-commerce integration was often tightly coupled
to individual e-commerce services, which poses a unique challenge for merchants
and individuals who are not engineer-focused or do not want to build out
multi-year roadmaps,” he explained.
That is typically 90% of the mid-market category. The brothers
tackled such integration issues by building into their platform a no-code
response to this problem. This approach allows merchants to take all their
best-of-breed tools or integrations and translate them into rich consumer
buying experiences from across the web, he added.
Current data shows vendors are far less willing to pay for a
cohesive solution that costs them in excess of $10-to-$15,000 a month,
according to Gerada.
In today’s economy, merchants are less willing to migrate. They
are concerned about the risk of downtime and disruptions to their existing tech
stack. The costs associated with other headless platform options are also a
significant barrier.
That is where Krepling enters the picture.
“We have seen very little friction. Merchants are seeing the
need to move quickly in an environment like this. Sometimes reducing the costs
can be as simple as just going hunting through your tech stack,” he said.
Marketing Plan
Empowers Mid-Market Merchants
Gerada’s marketing plan does not focus on making merchants
migrate. Instead, the company simply gives them a solution that allows them to
control their data and integration to reach their consumers.
That approach is key for making the Krepling platform more
innovative. It does this by cultivating experience built for the mid-market.