Online shopping has come a long way since the first digital transaction options first appeared on the internet. Now, the baseline expectation is a shopping experience that is hyperpersonalized, intuitive, immediate, and engaging.
Yet, despite merchants’ efforts, shopping cart abandonment rates are growing again this year. According to the Baymard Institute, which maintains a running meta-analysis on the matter across 50 studies, roughly seven out of every 10 shoppers who add an item to a cart will exit without buying.
StarApps is helping merchants address this, powering a smarter, smoother, and more seamless experience to transform online shopping. The startup builds product merchandising apps for Shopify and is used by more than 30,000 merchants, including 2,500 on Shopify Plus.
Bootstrapped from day one, over the course of a decade, StarApps has grown massively. Now, the startup features a 30-person team innovating shopping experiences for merchants around the world, generating $6 million in revenue a year. This year, StarApps made its first acquisition: AppMaker, a native mobile app platform powering over 200 enterprise brands and more than $100 million in annual GMV through its apps.
That success has been feasible because StarApps founder Shashank Agrawal lived the problem he and his team now solve for thousands of merchants. Agrawal was setting up his own Shopify store to sell into the U.S. market and ran into a narrow but persistent problem: there was no clean way to show the right product image for the variant a shopper picked.
This is a UX gap that can make or break a purchase. Images have long served as a deciding factor in whether to proceed to checkout or abandon a cart. Closing the product-image gap became StarApps’ first app in 2017.
And that fix pointed to something larger, too. As the team talked to hundreds of merchants about unsolved problems around variants, a pattern became clear: how much decision fatigue was hiding inside seemingly small moments like product variant selection, and how directly this friction was tied to abandoned carts and lost conversions.
That insight became a core part of StarApps’ mission to grow from a single app into a full merchandising and product-discovery suite.
StarApps’ core products help merchants create stronger, more intuitive and informative shopping experiences on Shopify, the kind of merchandising and product-discovery tools that directly address the friction behind abandoned carts.
One clear example is Swatch King, a variant-discovery tool that produced a three-month beta and went on to generate $1 million in revenue within two years, making it one of StarApps’ largest products.
Now, with AppMaker in StarApps’ suite of offerings, more merchants can access the app’s open architecture to build custom mobile experiences directly on the platform. This sidesteps the industry’s usual trade-off between a rigid template builder and a custom build that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
With these products and offerings in its arsenal, StarApps is now able to cover two of the biggest levers in ecommerce growth: conversion, through merchandising, and retention, through native mobile.
Crucially, as paid customer acquisition keeps getting more expensive, brands are pushing harder into retention and channels they own, with native mobile apps at the top of that list.
Featured image: Courtesy of StarApps
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
