A startup hoping to provide a credible alternative to Amazon has raised funding to double down on the gap in the market. PrettyDamnQuick ( PDQ ), which provides technology to allow retailers to customize and test different delivery and payment plans, has now raised its own Series A deal to expand its business.
With about 200 buyers of its books since its inception in 2020, New York-based PDQ says it currently processes about 30 million orders every month. That works out to $4 billion in total trade volume to date, and the company will process 300 million orders by the end of 2025.
PDQ's fundraising and growth comes as many watch to see what will happen to the e-commerce industry as a whole.
After a boom at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, demand has seen a sharp decline as companies and investors return to brick-and-mortar stores for shopping. Inflation and economic uncertainty didn't help that people were buying less.
For those looking for optimism, Recent statistics from the last holiday shopping period It was a mixed bag: there were some very intense shopping days; But they capped a period of lower actual growth than forecasters had expected.
Companies like PDQ may still benefit: Giving shoppers better discounts without cutting too much into a retailer's margins is more welcome than ever.
At the core of the problem PDQ is solving is a classic one for independent e-commerce retailers.
At their heart, e-commerce companies are more likely to be retailers, not technology experts. Some people who really want to take the tech layer out of their operations can list their products on Amazon's marketplace and let its search algorithms handle the rest. completeness Shipping You can choose a solution like Amazon that can use loyalty programs and other tools. PROCEDURE FOR FEE. Today, Temu, Instagram, There are other third-party options, including TikTok and others.
PDQ targets e-commerce companies that want to build their own online presence. It speaks to the spirit of independence that has fueled the growth of companies like Shopify, which helps people easily build online storefronts, and Stripe, which manages customer transactions.
PDQ is handling another important area in that chain: how these sites define and manage the broader payment experience, including shipping fees and methods. Other types of deals are included to entice shoppers to buy more.
Avi Moskowitz, CEO and founder of PDQ, said he was first inspired by his own experience of starting a craft brewery in Israel.
The company, called BeerBazaar, started in 2015 and in the early 2020s, “not really looking forward to what's coming,” Moskowitz said, decided it would make sense for them to build a website. The company used Shopify.
Then, a few weeks later, came COVID-19.
“Suddenly we were sending hundreds of orders a day; Some days there were over 1,000 orders,” he recalls. What seemed like an exciting boom in business should quickly turn into a nightmare. Both his company and its customers were “surprised by the lack of this Amazon-like experience we've been used to.”
Moskowitz and his team tried to fix things for BeerBazaar to give its users the “same confidence and trust” to shop on its site that they would get on Amazon: predictable information about shipping and its cost; shipping fee or remove altogether.
“As we started to address it ourselves, like many of the tools that were starting to emerge in e-commerce, like personalization and optimization and A/B testing, we realized that this was a platform that really needed it,” he said. “This is not about a specific feature. If you're going to optimize checkout, It's from the moment they walk into your store. Payment fulfillment Being able to manage the entire customer journey through tracking and delivery.”
After building the platform, Moskowitz thought it was a good enough idea to sell to others, and PDQ was born. Today, Moskowitz said the company can only integrate with online stores built on Shopify, but it plans to use some of the funding to expand to cover other sites.
The main purpose of PDQ is personalization; Said Moskowitz: “Essentially every shopper can experience a payment that works for them,” Moskowitz said.
order management at a retailer; If you already have shipping and payment partners. It consolidates these activities on a single platform. Where PDQ does not fulfill orders domestically or fulfills partners (third party logistics or 3PL, partners), PDQ works with a large number of carriers (USPS, DHL, FedEx, UPS, UPS, etc.) as well as smaller shipping companies and other 3PL providers.
Billing in other areas that support instrumentation; This includes order tracking and protection and A/B testing when a retailer wants to try different offers at checkout.
Other companies that deal with this aspect of the e-commerce flow, including Shopify itself, have a number of integration partners with PDQ. Like many other aspects of e-commerce that aim to address a highly fragmented market. There are likely to be multiple players creating strong offerings that will co-exist.
The real competition is with platforms like Amazon, offering retailers another option: moving into larger marketplaces to eliminate the need to think about independent products at all.
The company has raised $38 million so far, an undisclosed valuation in this latest round led by new investor Peakspan Capital. Previous backers TLV Partners and Moneta also joined.