Malomo Raises $2.7M to Help E-Commerce Merchants Leverage Post-Sale as a Strategic Marketing Channel

Investor syndicate includes e-commerce industry experts, positioning the company to disrupt the customer order tracking experience

INDIANAPOLIS, IN—October 2, 2020—Malomo, a shipment tracking and customer marketing platform for e-commerce brands, has raised a $2.7M Series Seed led by Base10 Partners. Malomo helps merchants turn their shipment tracking experience into a marketing channel for their brand, while enabling them to proactively communicate order status information by making delivery times transparent. The company plans on using this round of funding to expand its product and hire talent across its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

Malomo helps e-commerce brands generate more revenue and increase customer loyalty by turning their shipment tracking experience into a brand marketing channel. Customers are most excited right after hitting the buy button, but Malomo believes this is the most volatile step of the customer journey. Many online merchants view shipping purely as a cost center, but the shipping page is typically one of the highest-trafficked pages on an e-commerce site. With Malomo, instead of the shipping experience being a point of friction for both merchants and consumers, brands can leverage the channel to showcase their culture, promote new products they’re launching, ask for referrals, prime customers to share on social media, and more.

Malomo co-founders Yaw Aning and Anthony Smith have worked together for over a decade, previously founding and building a development agency that served Shopify merchants. Their time with these clients revealed the market need for an offering like Malomo. With Malomo, merchants can use shipment marketing to reinforce their brand’s mission and purpose with customers, creating long-term brand affinity and encouraging loyal, repeat customers. As for the name, Aning’s late mother built a retail business of her own in the midst of a battle against cancer. After her passing, Aning used her business’s name “Malomo” to honor her legacy.

“The shipping experience is a largely untapped marketing channel across e-commerce,” said Yaw Aning, co-founder and CEO of Malomo. “Customers, on average, visit the tracking page for their orders 3.6 times before they receive that package. That means brands are missing out on hundreds of thousands of impressions from just this channel. We hope with this latest round of funding, we’ll be able to help more merchants unlock this untapped potential.”

Brands that leverage Malomo’s platform consistently drive 4 to 6 figures of additional revenue per month using Malomo as a marketing channel. Besides cross-selling, upselling, and improving loyalty, Malomo also helps reduce merchants’ “where is my order” support requests by up to 76%. To date, Malomo has tracked millions of packages and is on track to grow 4x this year.

Malomo works with high-growth merchants like Summersalt, Magic Spoon, Caraway, and Grace Eleyae.

“Malomo has been a great addition to our marketing stack. We get to provide a branded experience so customers don’t have to deal with UPS as much and we get to provide an experience we’re proud of. This is all while we’re making money from customers buying again while they check their tracking. We love the partnership,” shared Angel Eleyae, CMO of women’s fashion brand Grace Eleyae.

“We’ve been blown away by how much revenue we could generate through sending emails for each step of the shipping process,” added Katy Riley, Director of Ecommerce and Digital Strategy for For Love & lemons. “It’s also been wonderful to have complete control over these shipping touchpoints because we can show our customers that we are anticipating their needs and assuring them their order is on the way."

This round of funding comes at a time of rapid acceleration in the retail offline to online movement. In April of 2020, online retail grew 209% compared to April 2019, and 27% of all retail sales in April 2020 were made via e-commerce. This sudden shift in volume particularly impacted carriers as they had a massive load on their existing infrastructure, which led to delivery delays. Since consumers are acutely aware of where their packages are, transparency in the post-sale experience is key.

“E-commerce is undoubtedly having a moment, but the real long-term winners will be the brands that can create outstanding customer experiences from all angles,” said Chris Zeoli, Principal at Base10 Partners. “Malomo’s suite of post-purchase customer experience tools plays well with the landscape of other tools merchants need to scale their businesses and we’re thrilled to be partnering with Malomo through this next stage of growth.”

The three funds leading Malomo’s Series Seed—Base10 Partners, Harlem Capital, and Irish Angels—are all founded and led by Black or female investors. Existing investors Hyde Park Venture Partners and High Alpha Capital also participated, and were joined by a syndicate of strategic angel investors. The syndicate includes investors with deep experience in the e-commerce space, including Ben Jabbawy (Founder & CEO of Privy), Jamie Sutton (former head of technology partnerships at Shopify Plus), Recharge co-founder Oisin O’Connor and head of partnerships Rob Barr, Rick Wittenbraker (CMO at Howler Brothers), and Dylan Whitman (former CEO of BVC Commerce), among several others. Malomo fits well into the existing e-commerce software ecosystem and the experts that are betting on its success further reinforce its credibility in the market.

“I’m very jazzed about how Malomo has democratized post-purchase UX technology. They allow merchants of all sizes to compete with big box retailers by delivering a world class experience that increases brand loyalty and merchant revenue,” said Jamie Sutton. “Other technologies in this space have been too costly or overly complex for anything but enterprise merchants to implement. Malomo empowers all merchants to level up and delight their customers.”