Plytix: A web store to rule them all
E-commerce has changed drastically since the launch of marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon in the mid-1990s. The number of ‘e-tailers’ competing for internet users’ interest has grown exponentially, and all of them now have access to multiple online platforms to sell their products. There is still a hiccup though: Whilst analytics solutions have evolved too, there is still no reliable solution to quantify product success across multiple marketplaces. As Morten Poulsen, CEO and co-founder of Danish start-up Plytix, puts it: “Brands can now sell their products on Amazon and other listing sites like Google Shopping and Facebook Catalogues, while also relying on third-party reseller web stores for additional sales. Never before has it been so important to see how products perform across all these different channels, but there are currently no ways to collect and consolidate such data.” Plytix addresses this gap by inviting brands to store and manage their product information on their dedicated product management platform. There, they can upload and modify all their product data and benefit from direct synchronisation with the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Google Shopping and Facebook. They also benefit from a brand portal allowing resellers to place orders. “Plytix is really easy to use,” Poulsen explains. “As a user, you just need to go Plytix.com and connect it with your Google Analytics. It takes only three clicks and doesn’t require any development whatsoever. Plytix will fetch data directly from the Google Analytics through an API (including historic data) and present it in the Plytix platform together with all your other product information. This will allow you to slice and dice your data across all product attributes.”
A new realm of possibility
Direct connection with Google Analytics is quite useful indeed. It grants access to all product-level analytics data directly from the Plytix platform, alongside existing product information. Brands can see the performance data from their own web store, but they will also find equivalent data from any third-party web store selling their products. This is all enabled by product matching using global trade identification numbers (GTINs), which are designed so that each prefix is unique to a brand. Plytix received EU support under the project PISPA (Plytix Information Sharing Platform and Analytics – Testing product market fit for a disruptive Information sharing platform for brands and resellers), and Poulsen says this support is the very thing that allowed his company to commercialise a technology that otherwise wouldn’t have been prioritised. Four years after the project’s launch, the Plytix analytics technology has managed to collect data from thousands of brands and resellers worldwide, and it keeps growing every day.
Future plans unfold
In the foreseeable future, the company’s efforts will focus on getting more data. “From there on, we will deploy predictive analytics that will allow our platform to tap into a pool of aggregated data from hundreds of thousands of brands as well as provide actionable insights to each based on big data,” Poulsen notes. Plytix would then be able to provide small-to-medium businesses with access to a sophisticated recommendation engine that they could deploy on their site. This engine would then give recommendations based on a collective data pool of a worldwide network of web stores and marketplaces. Poulsen even foresees a solution allowing developers to create the world’s first dynamic web stores: Instead of just sorting products alphabetically, by price or by date, web stores would then be able to sort products based on the predicted preferences of each visitor.
Keywords
Plytix, e-commerce, reseller, marketplace, product management, Google Analytics
