Born out of ex-Googler Morten Hellesøe Poulsen’s own frustration with the limitations of Google Analytics, Copenhagen-based Plytix offers a way for brands to track the performance of their products across multiple web shops.
It does this by providing an online image bank where retailers fetch the needed product images stored on Plytix’ CDN. Crucially, these images are tagged with an individual tracking code, making it possible to retrieve analytics data on each specific product regardless of which online retailer it is being sold by.
“The initial idea came to us when we were still at Google,” says Poulsen. “Here we were dealing with some of the biggest brands and retailers in Europe and we saw that there wasn’t a way for brands to track performance data from their products when they were sold on third-party webshops. When we realized that we had the recipe to overcome those challenges, it was time to take the leap of faith and get fully invested in bringing the idea to life.”
To help Plytix do just that — including recruiting a sales team and, rather curiously, setting up a HQ in Malaga, Spain — the 2014-founded company has raised a €500,000 seed round led by SEED Capital. Various unnamed angel investors also participated.
“Until now, brands haven’t been able to get a clear picture of how their products perform on third party retail channels or how users interact with the individual products. And on the retailer side, huge amounts of resources are spent on getting quality product images in a consistent format,” says Poulsen.
In other words, not only does Plytix aim to solve the products analytics side for brands selling their wares across third-party webshops, but it also wants to make life easier for the retailers themselves because product images are offered up in a consistent way and stored on the startup’s own CDN.
“So, brands get to create a much better user experience and product selection based on the new insights. Retailers reduce the cost of getting product images, and their site will also load quicker because the images are hosted on our servers.”
Asked how Plytix makes money, Poulsen says they don’t — yet. “For now, both brands and retailers have free access to all our services. In due time we will [offer] a premium version of Plytix that will include more sophisticated analytics features along with dedicated support,” he adds.