Techstars London alumni eRated is another startup taking aim at the online reputation problem, specifically relating to online sellers. Targeting online marketplaces, it lets sellers of a product or service create one online profile to rule them all that consolidates and makes portable their seller history and reputation imported from all of the disparate marketplaces and social sites they’re active in.
And in doing so, it claims to enable sellers to sell more and marketplaces to on-board new sellers in a much more efficient and trustworthy way.
That’s because, says eRated, 90 per cent of sellers are active on more than one marketplace but right now it’s not easy to bring an existing reputation with them, meaning that sellers need to reestablish their selling history, ratings and credentials for each new platform that join.
“eRated’s solution enables marketplaces to leverage existing web profiles, building their online businesses faster and more profitably,” eRated co-founder and CEO Boaz Cohen tells me in an email. “By evaluating web-wide parameters like their sales performance, customer satisfaction (reviews and ratings) and their social graph, the solution cuts out inefficiencies onboarding and verifying new sellers”.
Online sellers can either create their eRated profile directly on the site or via a widget that sits on the 17 or so partnering marketplaces. In the latter’s case, when signing up to a marketplace, sellers are prompted to link their account to eRated and create an eRated profile if they don’t already have one.
“eRated’s customers are online marketplaces,” says Cohen. “eRated helps these platforms smarter on-board and verify new users and better capitalize their existing ones to maximise profits. Up until now, these platforms treated all new users the same, even though many are already performing extremely well on other platforms.”
That hints to eRated’s business model: selling seller insights to marketplaces and helping sellers themselves make better use of data to help them, well, sell more.
“eRated helps marketplaces identify the high-potential sellers so they can offer them better sales terms and high exposure – this in order for them to start making high volume sales from day one,” he adds.
To help develop the data side of its offering and further market the service, the Tel Aviv-based company has raised a $1.7 million seed round. Investors include Techstars and various unnamed U.K. angel investors.
“The funding will enable us to deepen our holistic, smart-analytics approach to understanding seller’s web-wide profiles,” the company says in a statement. “Our marketplace partners are unlocking increased sales from day one. They are excited by eRated’s ability to understand a customer’s full profile and convert those scattered facts into improved seller’s life time value and sales.”