Emerging eCommerce Technology Spotlight – Q and A with Korey Lee of SumAll
The Emerging eCommerce Technology Spotlight Series is a series of blog posts where we sit down and interview the founders and executives of exciting, emerging, and compelling technology and platform companies about how their technology can help propel ecommerce organizations to the next level.
I recently had a chance to speak with Korey Lee, co-founder and VP of Operations of SumAll. He and his team have created a real-time dashboard to help provide ecommerce owners with best practice financial insights that improves sales and make their businesses more successful.
Nii: Describe the SumAll Platform in 140 characters?
Korey: SumAll is a value priced business intelligence tool to help businesses better understand, manage and execute data driven decisions.
Our design-centered app is easy to use and simple to integrate, aimed at the CEO or business manager of stores with electronic data. The initial focus pertains to revenue, time comparisons, trend analysis, product and customer metrics. We will go on to aggregate data across verticals and industries to create indices and benchmarks so businesses can measure their performance and efficiency against others. SumAll will help businesses make more money from commerce data without spending hours pouring over excel!
Nii: What led you and your team to building the application?
Korey: Our broader vision is to democratize data and put data back in the hands of the people it belongs to, the hardworking folks generating it. The bulk of data today, if even accessible is hidden behind APIs, archived in monstrous databases and tucked away in servers. We want to make that data available and useful to the individual. We’re starting with SMBs but want to make this a consumer product as well.
In the e-commerce world we can answer questions like
- How do my shipping fees stack up to my peers?
- What does my revenue look like compared to last month, last week, yesterday?
- Are my SEM campaigns and SEO efforts working and converting into revenue?
- Is traffic helping generate more revenue or is it just noise?
- With what frequency should I send direct emails? Is my open rate actually converting into purchases?
As we expand into the broader consumer market, we want to solve other problems.
- Ever wonder what Facebook does with all that information about your friends
- How does Twitter use all of you and your friends Tweets to learn more about you?
- How many emails do I actually reply to on a daily basis? Who are my most frequently contacted people? How can I filter my emails to be more efficient with my time?
- How much time am I spending online and what am I doing with that time? Is my social (Twitter, FB, Google+) and professional (LinkedIn) footprint increasing or shrinking
Nii: How can an online retailer benefit from incorporating this technology on their website?
Korey: Most small e-retailers don’t have the ability to see how their stores are performing on a real time basis today. Being able to see your revenue, shipping, tax, discounts, units sold, among other data points and filters and then compare it over time is a powerful tool to understanding your companies revenue history so you can use that information to affect the future.
Our insight engine generates a daily updated news feed containing a variety information from helpful tips about running an e-commerce store to metrics and forecasts about your store to broader e-commerce metrics across all of our users. For instance, one of our insights last week was as follows:
“In April, our customers earned an average of $87.12 USD per order. How does your store stack up?”
Armed with a simple and easy to use analytics tool as well as actionable insights, we hope that online retailers will be more able to make informed data driven decisions to increase revenue and minimize operational costs.
Nii: How easy it to install to implement the platform and start monitoring their businesses in real time?
Korey: Getting SumAll up and running takes less than 5 minutes. Since we’re on the cloud, there’s no software to install or download. After you verify your credentials to authorize us to pull down your data, the import takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes (1 time import only). We’ll send you an email when the import is done and your data will update in real time from there on. It’s kind of like watching a stock ticker except better because it’s your business!
Nii: What’s next for the SumAll development team?
Korey: In the near term we have integrations with Google Analytics and PayPal coming soon. We’re excited about this release because it will allow our current customers to compare the relationship between their transaction and traffic data. It will also open up our tools to a much broader audience (PayPal) and allow millions of stores to leverage their data to optimize revenue and decrease costs.
Nii: How can a merchant get started with implementing the SumAll for their business?
Korey: If you store is on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento, you can sign up right now! We’re in the process of integrating PayPal and Google Analytics which should be launched within the next few months if you’re using those platforms. In the case where you’re using a different platform, please fill out our platform request form and we’ll add it to our integrations list.
While we’re in Beta, SumAll is free. Sign up today and start making your data work for you at www.sumall.com
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