PrettyDamnQuick automates logistics delivery for retailers

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PrettyDamnQuick, an Israel-based automated ecommerce logistics company that focuses on businesses in the retail and logistics industry through automation, today announced it raised a $6 million seed round. 

COVID-19 brought the whole world to a halt in its early days. And even now, its impact remains indelible. However, while the pandemic impacted organizations in many ways, it also resulted in the emergence of new platforms leveraging automated technologies to solve critical problems.

Gartner’s 2020 Board of Directors Survey revealed that COVID-19 has created an urgent need for organizations to accelerate their digitization efforts, with 69% of boards of directors noting that the effects of the pandemic crisis are accelerating digital business initiatives. As the pandemic drives more organizations towards digital transformation, automation has become a cornerstone supporting the retail and logistics industry. 

According to another Gartner survey, two of the top three priorities for logistics leaders include cost reduction and increasing customer satisfaction. PrettyDamnQuick says its platform offers a turnkey solution that turns logistics into a competitive advantage for organizations through simple and scalable order management, predictive algorithms, and dashboards with actionable data.

PrettyDamnQuick CEO and cofounder, Avi Moskowitz, told VentureBeat that delivery is at the center of customer experience and PrettyDamnQuick’s platform aids customer retention by increasing conversion rates at checkout, lowering operational costs, and fast-tracking the delivery process.

How PrettyDamnQuick works

Source: PrettyDamnQuick

“Our system is broken into two parts: ‘promise what you deliver’ and ‘deliver what you promise’,” said Moskowitz. He explained that the first part lives in the checkout, where merchants can set up all necessary information — enabling them to present customers with accurate delivery expectations. Moskowitz said PrettyDamnQuick’s platform operates on predictive algorithms that help merchants to make smart decisions that expedite deliveries.

PrettyDamnQuick is designed to consider all the possibilities during a delivery — like bad weather, change of location, and others — and puts them into its checkout process so that the buyer is presented with a true picture and comes away with a clear expectation of the delivery. 

“When you don’t set up an aggressive and meaningful expectation for delivery, customers won’t convert. And that’s why we’ve seen conversion increase so much on the cart and checkout because when merchants say products will arrive at a particular time, our platform helps them to actually live up to it. That’s ‘promise what you deliver’.”

PrettyDamnQuick’s “promise what you deliver” feature also provides customer experience intelligence that provides real-time information on the closest stores for facilitating a delivery, helping retail businesses to save costs on moving inventory.

PrettyDamnQuick’s “deliver what you promise” feature comprises four key steps: validate, assign, fulfill, and track. Moskwoitz said the company’s platform does the following things:

  • Ensures every order signed is valid.
  • Considers several delivery options from a cloud-powered database and assigns it to the right fit.
  • Fulfills the order by ensuring the product is picked, packed, and ready for delivery.
  • Tracks the product delivery chain to ensure products get into the right hands.

PrettyDamnQuick is security-certified and goes through continual audits, according to Moskowitz. PrettyDamnQuick stores data in the cloud with AWS and never collects any payment or financial information in its system, he said.

“We use AWS cloud services provider because they have done a great job of being part of the support ecosystem. They were with us from the beginning, provided us with incentives to get started, gave us access to their teams, and were more oriented toward the startup community than anyone else,” he said.

How PrettyDamnQuick is differentiated in the logistics industry

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Source: PrettyDamnQuick

Moskowitz claims the validate function of their platform sets it apart from others in the market, as many businesses overlook it.

“Many logistics businesses don’t consider validation simply because they don’t understand the implications. What we do in the validation process is that we validate the phone number, address, inventory, and fraud, to ensure there are no fraudulent orders.”

According to Moskowitz, PrettyDamnQuick has competition in legacy systems that still use paper and spreadsheets for sorting data. He said this is especially so because logistics is an old industry and one of the latecomers in terms of adopting digital technologies. Moskowitz said PrettyDamnQuick’s automation capabilities sets it apart from other traditional logistics processing companies.

PrettyDamnQuick’s other competitors include Amazon, ShipStation, EasyShip and software-powered third-party logistics solutions (3PLs) as well as internal manual spreadsheets. The company’s customers include eHouse, Loom&Table, Apricoat and Israel’s Strauss Group.

Just like Amazon

Moskowitz argued that Amazon is just a highly sophisticated delivery business. “If you think about what Amazon does, that they’re getting a product from point A to point B as fast as possible. It doesn’t exactly matter to them what the product is. This is our goal: delivery that leverages data to provide the best customer experience,” he added.

Moskowitz said PrettyDamnQuick is bringing the Amazon experience to small and midsized businesses (SMSBs) by giving them the power and toolsets they need to set up an expectation in the checkout, helping them make deliveries at a fraction of the time it takes others.

“PrettyDamnQuick represents a new generation of ecommerce technology vendors focused on empowering small, micro and nano businesses to compete with their much larger competitors,” stated Yonatan Mandelbaum, Principal at TLV Partners, in the company’s press release.

Mandelbaum told VentureBeat that TLV Partners is looking to partner with driven founders. He said Moskowitz, cofounder Liran Erez, and the entire PrettyDamnQuick team have set out on a mission to enable small merchants to develop a long term relationship with their customers in a way that’s different from what has existed before.

“PrettyDamnQuick is building some of the most crucial tools to automate the delivery process for small businesses — as the company continues to expand its product offering in the next few years,” Mandelbaum said. PrettyDamnQuick will help small businesses, even those  with zero logistics expertise, solve their problems — making it easier to compete with their much larger competitors, Mandelbaum said.

Milestones to expect

This funding round was led by TLV Partners with participation from Ground Up Ventures, Verissimo Ventures, and some of Israel’s largest shipping, logistics and ecommerce brands. PrettyDamnQuick says the additional capital will help the company expand its platform into the U.S. market, where it will begin to serve nearly two million online stores through the established Shopify App Store ecosystem. The company plans to open an office in New York in the following months, where it will base its global presence.

Moskowitz cofounded PrettyDamnQuick with Erez in 2020. PrettyDamnQuick currently has a headcount of 30 and plans to double that number in the next six months. The company’s new product is available in a pre-launch phase for free to qualifying merchants and will be released publicly on the Shopify App Store later this year. 


Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz

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