Small and medium-sized e-commerce companies need all the help they can get to connect with their customers, provide support, and create positive word-of-mouth. That’s why Sunnytrail has built a social intelligence platform for identifying and interacting with customers online.
To find out who their customer are, companies need only connect their digital storefronts with Sunnytrail, and it will scour social networks to find them online. It then provides information about customers in an easy-to-use dashboard and provides tools for communicating with them.
The platform works by using publicly available information on various social networks, which helps it determines how influential various users are, and provides guidance about which customers a company should proactively engage with. Sunnytrail also monitors new customers as they make purchases, which can helps e-commerce companies identify when they get new high-profile users.
Why’s that important? Because word-of-mouth is still a valuable marketing channels, especially when some customers reach potentially thousands of connections on various social networks. Sunnytrail claims that about 60 percent of users share with friends when they have a positive customer experience, which for e-commerce companies can translate into new potential customers with little to no marketing, if they play their cards right.
Sunnytrail charges clients for use of its product based on the number of customers they have and manage through the platform. It has a free tier for clients who have less than 500 customers. Its second tier, for companies with up to 5,000 customers, costs $49 a month. Above that, and clients pay $99 a month for up to 20,000 customers. Currently, Sunnytrail works with Shopify or Goodsie e-commerce sites, but it’s looking to add more platforms as time goes on.
Sunnytrail was founded by Octav Druta, Vlad Berteanu, and Andrei Soare, and is based in Vancouver. The startup is part of the GrowLab startup incubator there. In addition to GrowLab, it’s raised seed funding from Boris Wertz’s new fund Version One Ventures, Mike Edwards of Initio Group, and BDC Venture Capital.