Meet Elliot, a new platform to manage your brand

Here's a way to get your brand across multiple e-commerce platforms

If you're a brand trying to manage your inventory across Jet.com, Amazon, eBay and a whole host of commerce platforms, it's probably safe to say the organizing of that information could be done more efficiently.

One company is trying to help. Elliot is a new retail management platform that claims it has the tools any brand needs to centralize customer, order and product data, and to easily sell globally. Last week, Elliot announced it raised $3 million in seed funding.  

“When you look at a retail brand, it can have five to 20 different localized dot-coms, 20 to 40 different seller standards, and 10 to 20 marketing tools,” said Sergio Villasenor, founder and CEO of Elliot. "There is no way of managing all the products, customer and order data in a centralized way – it’s very fragmented.”

Elliot provides centralized analytics, global operations management, and localization services like translation in 150 languages and price conversion in over 160 currencies. 

With Elliot, a brand that has an online and offline presence across the globe can have a simplified way to manage its products and customers across different channels. A large organization like that can, through the centralization process, become more agile in its operations.

One of Elliot’s clients, a health-monitoring wristband Biostrap, a niche product sold domestically, uses the platform to connect to new markets, such as Tmall and Lazada in Southeast Asia.

“We streamline global expansion with tools for localization,” Villasenor said. “When you’re looking at deploying your product across 20 different countries, you’re looking at 20 different solutions. All the nuances like shipping products, translation duties, price and currency conversion – all that can be done with Elliot. We make it really easy and efficient for a brand like that to expand across new regions and acquire new customers and services.”

Lead investors in Elliot’s seed round were Bowery Capital and Susa Ventures. Others in the round include Acceleprise, Bam Ventures, Flexport, and SV Angel. Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen stated in a press release that Elliot “brings down barriers to cross-border commerce.”

The pricing for Elliot’s services depends on the options a company chooses. A brand can subscribe to sales channels from an À-la-carte menu, Villasenor says, that can be as little as one to as many as 400. There is a fixed fee, as well as a processing fee between one and five percent, as well as extras for translation and shipping services.

Elliot became commercially available in August 2017 and now spans across markets in North America, APAC, Europe and Latin America.

In October, the Elliot team picked up speed and hired new experts. Currently, the startup continues hiring across all domains and plans to announce additional products soon. The new partners, Villasenor says, already introduce customers and deliver operational and product expertise. Elliot now has about 20 clients in various trades.

Villasenor worked in e-commerce for the last decade. As a software engineer, he created solutions for major brands in denim and beauty like Rag & Bone, John Varvatos and Juicy Couture. This experience, he says, plus ownership and lead roles at service-based agencies, as well as creating his own products, like Faux Freckles on top of the 2016 beauty trend, led to the creation of his first software product to help run commerce.

“Most service and technology providers give very one-op solutions to the problems we solve: removing the silos, the fragmented systems – this disjointed way of doing business,” Villasenor says. “We bring ways to manage everything from one location – which means providing brand consolidation, cost savings and value, and helping our customers be more efficient and smarter from day one.”

Image: Elliot