Scallium

Scallium is an IT solution for building a marketplace. We make it possible to work with many merchants through a single interface, upload product data to other systems and sales channels. This is a platform with a modular structure, where each module covers a specific business area: liaison with suppliers, product content management, automation of order processing, billing, and analytics.

I am the co-founder and CEO of the platform. Previously, I have 15 years of experience in developing software products for big e-commerce. And also at one point in my life, I consulted software companies on how to become more effective. Since 2017, I have been developing my own projects. I am directly involved in the operational management of the Scallium solution.

First, in 2016, the HUBBER platform appeared - this is a platform on which online stores work on the one hand, and suppliers on the other. Suppliers upload their products to the platform, and online shops take these products to their storefronts and receive their commission from each sale. In fact, they become marketplaces.
Retailers can connect to the HUBBER platform for a monthly fee and use the entire supplier SKU database for work.

When the platform began to gain momentum, a regional representative of the international retailer Leroy Merlin came to us. At that moment, they planned to launch a marketplace in Russia and they saw that our platform is great for working with suppliers and, in general, a good IT base for a full-fledged marketplace.
Leroy Merlin bought the product with an expensive perpetual license since we did not have an enterprise subscription solution at that time. We entered the project, and our team had to build a Leroy Merlin marketplace similar to the Hubber platform inside in a year and a half. We launched MVP in 3 months.

After the project with Leroy Merlin, we analyzed the market and saw that there is a demand for the same product not only in the CIS but also in the USA. Therefore, we have allocated a separate team to launch a SaaS solution for the medium+ and for the large enterprise segment of the e-commerce market on a subscription model.

Now we are a team of more than 50 people, but I never forget the time when we started, and I understand that we could not even imagine such a result if we did not have a team of professionals at the very beginning. So, I realized that this is one of the principles of Agile, which tells us: “Build products around motivated people. Provide them with an environment, support their needs, and trust them to get the job done.

The main differences from competitors are:

Our client is a mid-size + to large-sized e-commerce company that works with suppliers and has a desire to expand in the product range and in the number of suppliers.

We provide the next features on a single platform with an all-in-one account:

In other words, we optimize work with suppliers and product range for large and medium-sized e-commerce and retail companies, enabling them to use the marketplace business model. They work in one account with the entire end-to-end solution.

We use the iterative framework Scrum. Every 2 weeks we deliver value to the market by releasing platform updates. Each 3 interval ends with a special event - a Sprint Review, where we invite our clients. This is our most important feedback loop from the market and customers.

We also do research with potential customers and visualize the hypotheses of all features. And we collect information from the Customer Success Department.
All of the above greatly affects the priority of tasks. Actually, we prioritize tasks according to the Balanced ScoreCard model.

We use feedback from customers and change our development path depending on their needs. It turns out that we are constantly changing at regular intervals.

My favorite client is the one who began to develop their product on their own. This is very difficult, and they are facing a huge number of problems in this way. And usually, this path is very expensive, 10 or hundreds times the price of a subscription to our product. That is why such clients usually come back to us with the decision to work on our product, which we developed based on 5 years of experience in the enterprise and invested many millions of USD.

Among current subscription customers, there are no churned yet, since we sell the product by subscription model for only a year, but we expect that gross retention will be within 90% or even better.

Of course! We have a very complex product in terms of technology and implementation. Therefore, we provide several levels of clients' assistance and integrator companies' support. This includes technical documentation, functionality description, and description of all technical parts like web services, methods, extension points, etc. Also, we provide training for our clients as a part of the Customer Success process.

We provide 4 levels of support -
Level 1 - customers can contact and resolve the issue with their account manager.
Level 2 - duty team can give feedback and help with simple technical questions.
Level 3 - the implementation team can help with almost all the technical issues.
Level 4 - product team can help with complex technical tasks.

We started active sales under the subscription model in April 2021. So far, we have a turnover of just a little over 1 million dollars. But we have a clear strategy on how to grow 5 times in 2022 and keep growing later. Since the marketplace market grows at 55% per year, it is important for us to stay in line with market development.

Our goal is to build a globally unified platform that will combine several types of participants:
1 - Existing and new e-сommerce businesses that have a storefront and have implemented the marketplace business model in the emerging marketplace market worldwide.
2 - Product Sellers (suppliers, merchants) who want to sell on local, international marketplaces, and on crossboard platforms.
The platform will provide participants with the tools to work, rules, and ways to effectively deliver value by creating a single SaaS platform.