CommentSold acquires Social Retail Success

CommentSold, a digital commerce solution that enables retail businesses to unlock sales growth through live and social selling, recently acquired Social Retail Success (SRS). The SRS advanced business analytics suite helps retailers on the CommentSold platform optimize sales, plan and manage inventory, and manage customer relationships to increase profitability. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. CommentSold also announced that SRS founder Tim Gallagher has joined CommentSold as Director of Retail Strategy. Finn Faldi, chief operating officer of CommentSold, spoke to FashionUnited about why the acquisition of SRS was a strategic move and future plans.

Why did you all want to acquire Social Retail Success?

SRS was designed specifically for our larger-volume merchants, and we wanted to be able to truly integrate its technology into our business model and empower more retailers to succeed through access to its enhanced analytics suite. We also wanted to continue investing in the growth of our retailers.

How do you see this acquisition benefiting CommentSold?

The SRS platform has already proven to help our merchants succeed, and I think now that we’ve acquired its technology, it will push more and more of our retailers to want to be at a point in their business journey so that they can truly utilize what its analytics tools and key performance indicator dashboards have to offer. It will enhance the already existing tools that are part of our platform.

What are your plans for retail strategy after this acquisition?

We've been making strategic acquisitions to better enhance the CommentSold platform, and recently acquired marketing message customization and scheduling tool Vizzlie, as well as hired a new Chief Product Officer, Andrew Chen.

What enhanced analytics can retail partners expect after this acquisition?

The enhanced analytics suite designed by SRS will give our retail partners access to 38 daily business reports that show valuable insights into their sales, inventory planning, inventory management, customer management and profitability. These include everything from order and summary profitability reports and inventory analysis to customer acquisition, loyalty and channel analysis. Through these tools, our partners will reach new customers while running a cost-saving retail business.

Why should independent retailers join your platform?

CommentSold is truly unique, as we support our retail partners every step of the way in their journey, handling everything on the backend so retailers can automate their inventory and order management, payments, invoicing, labeling, packaging and fulfillment processing and focus on their live sales to continue growing their businesses.

How large should a retailer be before joining your platform?

There is no size limit for a retailer to join our platform; however, our larger-volume businesses will see the most value in the SRS analytics suite.

How does your software help with customer conversion?

Because we help our retail partners with all of the business operations, they are able to really focus on their live sales and connect with their customers on a personal level, which in turn increases customer loyalty and conversion. With the addition of SRS complementing our existing tools, our retailers can now access data down to size and color, truly understanding what their customer is looking for and catering exactly to his or her needs.

What can retailers expect from the launch of the customer lifetime value analysis?

We’re working on rolling out customer lifetime value reports, which will be available to select retailers.

How long was this deal with SRS in the works?

Tim launched SRS around 3.5 years ago, and as a 100% CommentSold tool since its inception, we’ve been working with Tim on integrating this platform for a while.