This is an old story: a small e-commerce owner wants to build a great landing page for their business, but the available tools only get them so far and they don’t have the money to hire a developer.
This is true Replo comes in, providing a low-code web platform and marketplace so businesses can build customizable websites, similar to how a child builds with Lego.
The company is currently targeting Shopify users and offers hundreds of built-in templates that Replo shows you how to use or lets you build a page from scratch.
Users can edit text, build sections, change products, or save text sections to a library for use on other pages. In addition, there is a section library. It also integrates with a user’s Shopify store.
You can start using Replo for free with one user and get unlimited features and samples. The next tier starts at $99 per month.
Replo targets mid-market e-commerce companies, those that sell between $1 million and $100 million per year. Co-founder Yuxin Zhu called this “an interesting problem” because there is a spectrum of e-commerce businesses, from the mom-and-pop with two people to a big household name that works lean with 10 people.
“They don’t have developers or have millions of dollars to hire expensive engineers,” he told businesskinda.com. “However, they all still need to launch content and expand their e-commerce experience, and the part that was interesting to us was that this was a solvable problem.”
The 2-year-old company was founded by Zhu and Noah Gilmore, who know a thing or two about using technology to make something better. While students at UC Berkeley, they launched and sold Berkeleytime.com, a platform that digitized Berkeley’s course scheduling system.
Prior to starting Replo, Zhu and Gilmore held senior engineering and management positions at Uber and Plangrid, respectively. Rounding out the Replo team are Justin Wiley, former VP of business development at JUMP, and Steven Schlaefer, who previously worked at LiveRamp.
The founders honed the business at Y Combinator and were part of the Summer 2021 batch. Today, the company announced a $4.2 million seed round from backers including Y Combinator, Infinity Ventures, La Famiglia, Figma Ventures, Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), and a group of strategic investors from the e-commerce space.
Meanwhile, connecting to Shopify is big. Shopify handled $175 billion in online sales in 2021, and there were over 6 million Shopify Plus stores in 2022.
So Replo is not alone in building infrastructure for these vendors or raising venture capital for their approach. For example, Triple Whale, Postscript, Shop Circle, and Popup all fundraised over the past year for their respective tools to help Shopify merchants build their business.
Since the platform’s official launch in 2022, Replo has more than 1,000 brands and agencies using it and 300 paying customers who have come on board in the past three months, Zhu said.
Much of the new funding will be spent making strategic hires in engineering and product development to meet the demand the company is currently seeing.
“Word of mouth is both positive and negative,” said Zhu. “It’s good if everyone starts talking about it, but we also want to build a community and support channel so things can happen without us.”
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.