Hi everyone I’m working on a prototype to help small-medium size independent brands increase their ecommerce traffic and sales through complementary upselling. The idea is that stores would partner with complementary shops and share each other brand-aligned products through cart add-ons, post-checkout recommendations, and post sale emails in order to increase visibility and discoverability for both stores in a simple, trust-based way, no ads or direct cost per click.
Here is more info on the initial idea https://pairswith.ricciapps.com/. I’m looking to hear input for validation on the idea and find some beta testers. Currently its pure research to determine viability.
If you’re open to sharing your perspective (or testing a very early prototype), I’d really appreciate it. Happy to return the favor with feedback on your site/branding as well.
IMO, it would probably help if you can compare your concept against what’s available – say, Shopify Collective or Product network?
This is an interesting idea, especially for smaller Shopify brands that don’t have large advertising budgets.
One thing I’d be curious about is how you’ll match complementary stores. Will merchants be able to approve or reject recommended partners to make sure the products fit their brand?
I’d also be interested in seeing how you handle attribution and measure the additional sales generated for both stores.
Best of luck with the research and beta testing—I hope you get some valuable feedback from the community!
Yes, the plan for the validation phase would be for it to be manual approval for specific brands as well as products. Attribution and additional sales will be a bit difficult to track, but I believe treating the routing as essentially embedded pages will be able to solve that. Really appreciate your insight. Would be interested to hear what has worked on your own projects
Good question. Most existing tools in this space (Shopify Collective, Rokt Catalog, Syncio) are built around catalog expansion (one store displays and fulfills another’s products, essentially a modernized dropshipping relationship). I am trying to help two independently-run stores actually use each other’s sites to help existing customers to discover each other’s products at moments when they’re already receptive. The goal is essentially zero cost impressions between complementary brands.