Featured Startup Pitch: MartMobi’s ecommerce platform is built to enable more merchants to optimize for sales via mobile device

By Satya Krishna Ganni, MartMobi co-founder and CEO

ELEVATOR PITCH

MartMobi’s mobile ecommerce platform helps online retailers dramatically improve their mobile conversions. The platform enables seamless connectivity with a retailer’s existing shopping cart solutions—such as Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, and Yahoo—and provides beautiful mobile, tablet sites, and native apps, all of this without the need to write a single line of code. MartMobi is part of the Techstars family.

PRODUCT/FEATURE DESCRIPTION

With MartMobi, online retailers can instantly create beautiful mobile websites and apps that are completely synchronized with their online shopping carts. The platform integrates seamlessly with commonly-used back-end ecommerce systems such as Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce, Yahoo commerce, Volusion, 3dcart, and even works with custom-built ecommerce solutions.

With this back-end integration, merchants continue to manage only one store, while offering a fully-optimized experience for all their mobile customers. By creating an optimized mobile presence, we offer merchants an immediate and significant uplift in mobile sales. Many of the merchants we work with achieve positive ROI within their first month.

Key Highlights:

Support all popular mobile platforms—mobile web, tablet web, iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows
Fully-optimized templates with branding customization to retain the merchant’s online visual appeal
Ability to build completely custom mobile sites and native apps in two-to-three days
Extremely fast page loading, which reduces bounce rate and increases conversion rates
Adaptive content delivery that tailors content depending on the user’s device
Marketing tool kit that allows merchants to engage with their mobile users in real-time using tactics such as push notifications, SMS, etc.

FOUNDING STORY

MartMobi’s founders, Pramod Nair and I, are serial technology entrepreneurs with a flair for challenges. We first came together to create LearnSocial, an online learning platform which was acquired within six months of its launch. During the LearnSocial days, we built camaraderie and an eye for opportunities.

When we recognized the hardships of building a mobile site and apps for LearnSocial, Pramod and I realized they could ease the pain that online retailers face when dealing with mobile by making it a simple, seamless process that can be completed in three simple clicks. This idea eventually flourished into MartMobi, currently a TechStars company.

MARKETING/PROMOTION STRATEGY

As a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company, MartMobi uses a self-serve model that can rapidly scale through inbound customer leads. Two things need to be executed well to achieve this strategy:

Build a compelling product that captivates customers and gets them addicted. This is a process of continuous innovation and iterative development that is one of MartMobi’s guiding philosophies.
Generate awareness amongst ecommerce merchants that MartMobi is the solution to their mobile conversion woes. This is done at four levels:
- TOFU (top-of-the-funnel): At this level, merchants need to be educated about the pertinence and urgency of going mobile. This education is done primarily through content-driven influencer marketing.
- MOFU (middle-of-the-funnel): The second level comprises merchants who are keen on going mobile and are evaluating vendors. Such merchants are targeted through SEO, website optimization, partner marketing and PR.
- BOFU (bottom-of-the-funnel): Merchants who have signed up for the trial typically fall into this category. These merchants are converted by email, marketing automation and easy onboarding workflows.
- POFU (post-funnel): Committed customer service, a superlative product, and competitive pricing make MartMobi an irresistible product, thereby earning loyalty and advocacy that feeds into TOFU and MOFU.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

Globally, there are 600,000 active online stores, of which less than ten percent are optimized for mobile. Further, less than two percent have mobile apps, which are a necessary customer retention asset. This presents an annual market opportunity of $1.5 billion.

HOW WE ARE UNIQUE

Mobile commerce platforms are a complicated technology, and hence vendors are few-and-far-between. Of this handful of options, we believe that MartMobi provides the most compelling offering for the following reasons:

Beautiful and customizable design templates that are far more optimized for conversions than any other platform
Seamless connectivity with their existing ecommerce solutions
Tremendous mobile sales enablement, facilitated by an intuitive control panel and a user-friendly marketing toolkit that can be used by non-technical personnel such as marketing heads
Fastest turnaround time and fanatic customer service

BUSINESS MODEL

MartMobi’s business model is driven by monthly subscriptions that vary based on catalog size and feature requirements. Plans start from as low as $49 per month up to $199 per month. Enterprise solutions for large merchants are dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Professional services are also provided for merchants that need a deeper level of customization.

CURRENT NEEDS

We are looking for key hires in inside sales, marketing and mobile development.

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HEADQUARTERS: Chicago