InterCultural Elements are experts in all things cross border and for many years have been building internal tools to manage everything from localisation of keywords to handling marketplace item specifics and attributes. They’ve now announced plans to spin-off an internally developed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product into a new company, called eCommeleon, to offer these capabilities to retailers.
Whereas the services offered by InterCultural Elements allow online sellers to outsource many of their marketplace expansion projects, the purpose of eCommeleon is to allow sellers to bring this expertise in house. Therefore, eCommeleon is scalable and can reach a much larger user base consolidating their know-how in this SaaS product.
eCommeleon combines more than a decade of online marketplace know-how with tried and tested data optimisation modules and pioneering marketplace validation, designed specifically for online retailers and marketplace sellers. It will help sellers navigate their way through the intricacies of marketplace selling, for instance instead of specifying ‘100% cotton’ a marketplace attribute might just be ‘cotton’ or instead of ‘silver’ it’s ‘grey’. The aim is that when you upload a file eCommeleon will end of ‘error on line 127’ which you then have to resolve, when send upload a file to a marketplace it will be exactly what the marketplace wants to receive.
eCommeleon will also made it easy to save templates e.g. UK template and DE template for product listings. This could for instance be a price builder using purchase price, marketplace commission, weight, round up, FBA costs, dynamic fixed exchange rate etc to create a sales price in a different currency. There will also be a string builder – valuable for retailers with a high turnover of products. A title could be specified as “GENDER plus BRAND plus SIZE plus COLOUR plus MATERIAL” with attributes pulled from a lookup list that translates sizes, gender, material type, colour, brand etc.
Having invested heavily in the software development in recent years, this spin-off will enable ICE to refocus efforts on continuing to improve the services side of the business, as well as to offer its services to a broader range of clients. eCommeleon GmbH will be led by co-founders Eduard Gerritsen (InterCultural Elements co-founder and current MD) & Jesse Wragg (current Head of Sales at InterCultural Elements).
The spin-off to eCommeleon is expected to be completed in October of this year, and the first customers are already being onboarded. Several key market players have expressed their interest and eCommeleon can be used by anyone selling on marketplaces, from bedroom sellers to enterprise level brands.
