As more and more retailers continue to set up shop online, producing a lot of customer and other actionable data along the way, it follows that those businesses that are able to become data-driven will likely develop a competitive advantage. Larger e-commerce companies have known this for a long time and have the internal IT muscle to build out their own Business Intelligence systems or buy in expensive off-the-shelf Enterprise solutions — an option that isn’t available to the majority of online shops.
Enter Hamburg-based Minubo, which offers what it calls Business Intelligence as a Service, a central “Data Hub” hosted in the cloud that pulls in an online retailer’s various data-points to present a holistic view of their analytics to enable them to make “better, data-driven decisions”.
Today the startup is announcing that it’s raised a €1 million seed round from a host of backers including the pan-European accelerator Seedcamp, and VCs Tola Capital, and High Tech Gruenderfonds, along with a group of prominent angel investors. The latter comprises of Stephan Schambach (founder of Demandware and Intershop), Alexander Brühl (former Senior Partner at Atlas Venture), Mirko Caspar, Dirk Graber and Christian Luhmann (founders of Mister Spex), Hubertus Bessau, Philipp Kraiss and Max Wittrock (founders of Mymuesli.com), and Dominik Gyllensvärd. These are people that have some serious e-commerce chops of their own.
Specifically, Minubo’s dashboard integrates web analytics, shop and ERP data in one place – data that is otherwise fragmented, making it near-impossible to get a holistic overview from which an online retailer can take action on. By consolidating this data in an intelligent way, data-driven decision making can happen to enable things like more efficient allocation of marketing budgets by identifying unprofitable channels over time, adjusting assortments by connecting sales margins with product placement on an online shop’s website, and understanding Customer Lifetime Values per online channel e.g. Facebook marketing versus traditional SEO.
In addition, along with an aggregated view, Minubo enables direct access to the raw data. The company is also talking up its on-boarding process for online stores, enabling them to be up and running “in minutes”. And conceding that many online retailers are not experts in e-commerce, the platform provides what it calls “contextual white papers” to help them get up to speed with best practice and understanding what data should impact business decisions.
Lastly, the other big sell is that Minubo operates entirely in the cloud, doing all of the IT heavy lifting for the online shops that make use of the service. To that end, the startup is utilising Amazon Cloud in order to scale gracefully. There’s a cost advantage, too, obviously. Minubo says that Enterprise Business Intelligence systems can cost anything between 50,000 – 300,000 Euros. In contrast, after a free 30-day trial, it charges a monthly fee between 200 and 4,000 Euro depending on required features and revenue size. Competitors are said to include RJMetrics, DOMO, Good Data, and Datapine.