Maintaining Your Web Store and Peace of Mind - Interview with Startups of the Year Nominee, Revend

Hey Hackers,

Revend has been nominated in HackerNoon's annual Startup of the Year awards in Antwerp, Belgium.

Please vote for us here: https://hackernoon.com/startups/europe/europe-antwerp-belgium.

Read more about us below to understand why we deserve your vote.

Meet Revend

Founded in early 2022, Revend is a company dedicated to bringing continuous peace of mind to e-commerce operators worldwide via real-time monitoring of your webshop.

In the years prior to co-founding Revend, my CTO Alex Reis was looking for ways to react quicker to operational issues that impacted the revenue of the scaling e-commerce stores he was responsible for running. Missed issues - or issues caught too late - often cost tens of thousands in lost revenue and time spent digging through dashboards after the fact.

Frustrated by the lack of solutions he found, and motivated by the value that a properly adjusted tool could provide, Alex brought in former colleagues and fellow tech entrepreneurs Peter Wellens (me) and Bert Baeck. Together, we got the first prototype of Revend into the hands of 30 e-commerce companies, gathered feedback to improve the product, and secured an investment to further grow Revend.

Today, our team and user base are accelerating at a rapid pace. Revend’s monitoring ensures peace of mind around the clock for e-commerce stores in all shapes and sizes.

My Role

My name is Peter Wellens, a three-time founder, including co-founder at Revend. My role at the company is that of co-founding CEO. In practice, I’m the first point of contact for many of our new users, partners, and investors supporting us in pursuing our mission.

How We're Disrupting/Improving the e-Commerce Industry

Revend is firmly focused on serving the e-commerce community.

Business owners, marketers, and platform managers in this community are required to be extremely up-to-date at all times, with an onslaught of new tools and software releasing constantly. Staying on top of the performance of your web store in such an environment can be tough.

This is where Revend can help.

Revend is disruptive in the sense that it is both very easy to implement and highly focused on business users (as opposed to IT users) as its main audience. Its main point of contact with you is via notifications on Slack, Teams, or email.

Existing monitoring tools are either quite complex and time-consuming to set up and maintain, or offer no real-time view of the operational KPIs that a marketeer wants to track (e.g. product views, add-to carts, funnel conversions, checkouts). Revend solves all that and uses advanced AI to make sure you get a self-adjusting model that is carefully tailored to the performance of your exact webshop.

Standing Out from The Crowd

We knew from the outset that just having great and accurate monitoring was not going to be enough to stand out, so from day one, we made sure that:

• Made for business people, not (just) developers - Revend monitors your buying journey, not your backend or frontend systems.
• Real-time monitoring - we make sure you are the first to know if there is a problem with your shop in minutes, not hours or days.
• Turnkey - Easy, no-hassle 5 minute setup, no custom integration or long implementation project required.
  

My Predictions on the e-Commerce Industry in 2023

I talk to e-commerce founders, solution providers, and agencies on a daily basis. My predictions for 2023, based on those conversations so far, are the following:

• In a cookieless world, first-party data will become a webshop’s lifeblood for the entire funnel. In order to keep doing meaningful marketing automation, a plan to consistently harvest this data will be(come) crucial.

• When selling via marketplaces, the ownership of data will become more of a hot topic. When the marketplace simply doesn't offer you access to the full data story, the question becomes: does making more money on marketplaces offset the blindness to your own customers' data in the long run?

• Headless or composable e-commerce is here to stay. I’ve seen both successful agencies and brands use it to their advantage, and there seems to be no going back.

• Live e-commerce could see growth for Gen-Z and younger audiences for the upcoming Black Friday, as social media giants continue to invest heavily in it. Whether they can break into the European and US markets (where they have had meager results so far) remains to be seen.

What word defines the state of e-Commerce in 2023?

The word I would choose is “Flowing”. There’s never a moment of stasis, everything is constantly moving, updating, and shifting.

One of many examples is the forced move to GA4, which has meant quite to overhaul in terms of tracking and monitoring for a lot of e-commerce players.

Why we decided to participate in HackerNoon's Startup of the Year awards

After more than a year in stealth mode, our team is ready to show what we’ve been working on, and we’re proud of it. Happy users, a clear value, and an easy-to-use product.

HackerNoon is the perfect platform to reach like-minded people who can evaluate and discuss the topics we are interested in.

Final Thoughts

Whether you are an e-commerce operator who just heard from us, a startup aficionado browsing HackerNoon, or a Revend-supporter from day one, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this far.

I promise that our team and I will continue doing our best to serve the e-commerce community as best we can, and your support for staying on that path is much appreciated.