Rally Commerce, Inc., the headless ecommerce solution that provides customers with a one-click checkout experience, has announced a fundraise of $6 million to support a decentralized ecommerce system. The tool gives scaling ecommerce companies the option to choose their preferred frontend and backend, connecting the two with a modern checkout solution that promotes an average order value increase of up to 12 percent and a fast, secure checkout experience for customers.
The founders of Rally previously developed the checkout tool CartHook, which processed nearly $3 billion in merchant sales on the Shopify platform. Of that merchant revenue, $290 million was generated by its personalized add-on recommendations. CartHook was ultimately stymied by Shopify’s investment in Shop Pay, the ecommerce platform’s integrated checkout system. With Rally, the founders hope to help merchants looking to scale beyond the limitations of current platforms to build their own commerce stack.
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What is headless checkout?
According to Jordan Gal, Rally’s CEO and co-founder, headless checkout is a “classic unbundling” of the traditional ecommerce platform, which restricts the options that merchants have to mix and match the frontend, backend, and checkout systems that work best for them. Growing businesses and merchants who are looking to scale their businesses beyond the traditional model of allowing the ecommerce platform to define what the store looks like, what the merchant infrastructure is built on, and which checkout tools the merchants use will be able to compose their full ecommerce stack with headless checkout solutions.
To that end, headless checkout solutions like Rally are built to work with existing ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce and WooCommerce, but can also integrate with next-generation headless ecommerce solutions like Builder.io and Swell.
Why is unbundling ecommerce solutions important?
The pandemic significantly accelerated the trend toward ecommerce and hybrid commerce. Both Macy’s and Walmart have recently invested in technologies that support and streamline the move to omnichannel experiences. And while small businesses may not be moving product at the scale of Walmart, growing businesses may soon find that the technologies that supported their initial growth will no longer support their long term goals.
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These scaling merchants don’t have the resources to build a fully custom system. Gal believes that Rally serves the needs of businesses who are looking to go beyond the restrictions of today’s ecommerce platforms but still need the support of a composable system.
In an interview with Small Business Computing, Gal said, “The reason platforms like Shopify have done so well is because there’s never been a better solution for a small business to get up and running, that’s not going away.. But as a brand increases in sophistication, revenue, resources, and ambitions, they start to confront limitations.”
“It’s everyone’s job in the headless world to first satisfy merchants who need it now, then shift the focus toward a democratization of the technology, away from developing needs and costs. I think the future of commerce looks like a constellation of hosted services.”
One-click customer experiences
For Rally, improving customer experience goes hand-in-hand with a flexible tech stack. A key component of Rally is the concept of a customer information vault. If a customer decides to opt into the vault, Rally will securely store customer checkout information, which will result in a one-click experience for the customer whenever they purchase goods on a site that uses the Rally checkout software.
The tools are currently being developed in an early access beta to ensure that the security, experience, and continuity of the payment system are flawless before releasing to the wider public.
