Consumers are all about being able to make purchases fast and easy, but some merchants don’t have the engineering or product teams to code for all of that.
This is where Pack comes in. The San Diego–based company does most of the coding for merchants and delivers it via a front-end headless commerce platform for Shopify merchants so they can create a more seamless customer experience.
Working in a headless environment means you can tinker with the front end of your website — for example, the look, feel and function of the site — without disturbing the back end, which is where the payments, order details and fulfillment live.
Since being founded in 2019, Pack has built some of the first headless storefronts in North America and now works with e-commerce brands, including Truff, Liquid I.V., Cuts Clothing and Prima. The company said since Cuts began working with them, customer conversions grew by 200% year over year.
Cory Cummings, Pack co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch he worked in e-commerce for a decade building Shopify themes from scratch. That’s how he found that much of the work involved “shoving data into places where it didn’t feel right,” like in a platform versus front end. Merchants were left wondering why it was confusing to develop their storefronts.
Pack is playing in a similar space with startups like Popup, fabric, Swell and Shopistry, but Cummings said that unlike other headless companies that try to do more than just storefronts, Pack just wants to do front end.
“We put the guard rails in place so Instead of having to be a tech company or sign up for a bunch of different integrations, they can just do Pack,” he said. “We give them everything they need to be successful.”
Today, Pack announced $3 million in seed financing to grow the company, secure strategic partnership and add to its team of engineers, product, design and go-to-market capabilities. This brings the company’s total fundraising to date to $6 million.
The company is working with nearly 20 midmarket and enterprise-level customers and has a lot of growth in the pipeline, Cummings said. It spent the last year investing in its product and feature development, and this year has seen 470% growth in the product.
“We definitely have an aggressive roadmap to build out features,” he added. “It’s important to us that when people go headless, it is easier for them to have control over their infrastructure. Plus, we have a Shopify focus today, but we want to look at back end verticals and integrate those in the future.”
Meanwhile, Norwest Venture Partners led the round and was joined by existing investor Alpaca and new investor Vanterra Ventures.
Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, told TechCrunch that a “major shift is happening in the world of retail,” and with that, more retailers want to move away from the “tightly bound, inflexible e-commerce platforms.”
“Pack is unique in this market in that they are entirely focused on customer experience, presentation layer and the content that powers that,” Beechuk added. “Others focus on users or front-end, but also do orchestration or back-end, which dilutes the overall offering.”