It’s 2024, and eCommerce brands are in trouble. Costs are rising and servicing an increasingly global customer base is getting far too complex. 15 years ago, Shopify armed the rebels, but we were armed with knives only to find out years later that we’re actually in a gunfight.
Our belief at Pietra is that it’s time to solve this problem, holistically, and for a global operator base. The idea is simple: create a shared platform with the most common software, services, and turn-key infrastructure that’s needed to run a profitable online business. And to deliver significantly lower costs for most people in the world, we’ll make it a membership model, where everyone chips in a little, and the larger community gets the benefits. Like a Costco membership but for eCommerce software and services. It has never been done before, but that isn't stopping us.
We knew after the first 300,000 eCommerce operators signed up for Pietra, that this was something that not only the world needed, but was desperate for.
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Commerce is a universal problem
When I was at Uber, Travis helped me realize something simple and powerful. There are problems that exist where if you go to any city in the world the problem will resonate. I call these “Universal Problems”. Now try this: go to a bar, and ask a crowd who has a business idea, and you’ll find out that small business entrepreneurship is a Universal Problem. And yet, it’s still very hard to go from, “I have an idea”, to a “I have a company”. And if you're creative, and not technical, it gets even harder.
Over the last few years, we’ve been laser focused on standing up the first global commerce platform designed to help entrepreneurs start their businesses. We spent years finding the best factories in the world, and digitized them, so now anyone in the world can work directly with the best factories to design and manufacture products. We built our own global fulfillment network so you can order inventory from factories, and send them directly to Pietra for order fulfillment. Finally, we built storefront and marketing software to make it easier to sell your product online. Members got access to software and tools that were often 40-50% lower cost than if they went and purchased it themselves and saved the headache of coordinating between vendors. And if you weren’t ready to buy a membership and start your entrepreneurial journey, we provided services like weekly workshops, playbooks, and other educational materials for free to get you prepared.
Pietra 1.0: The first shared platform for commerce
The first iteration of Pietra was a smashing success. Operators could buy different memberships based on the software and services they wanted to use, some starting at just $14/mo, and the entire community of operators would get the best rates on things they would otherwise have to pay full price for.
Some notable milestones:
- 300,000 entrepreneurs have Pietra accounts
- $15M worth of products and packaging were manufactured through vetted factories
- 1M orders were shipped to customers from the North Pole all the way to Australia
- 1M potential customers were acquired through our marketing tools
- 1M product designs were generated using our ai tools
But then, something magical happened. We started seeing larger brands and more sophisticated operators coming into our community, and purchased memberships to leverage Pietra’s vast platform. This allowed Pietra to scale up our platform and infrastructure to support these larger brands, and in turn, all the smaller brands benefited from economies of scale.
So what’s next? Well, after years of building software, services, and infrastructure to start a brand, it was becoming clear that Pietra was being used as a central hub to manage SMB operations. So we decided to lean in.
Introducing Pietra 2.0: Your Operations Hub
Our goal with Pietra is to continuously provide value to our members. This includes after the initial set up of your business. Today, Pietra is announcing four new products and features that will help business owners around the world save millions operating their business and give them access to discounted software and services to grow their sales. Our goal with a Pietra membership is to allow operators to build mega businesses, more profitably, than ever before.
Pietra Teams
The eCommerce industry thrives on delegation and small, often distributed, operators working together to grow a brand. So today we’re introducing Pietra Teams, which allows eCommerce teams to invite operators to different parts of Pietra’s operations hub, and assign permissions to areas of the product they are responsible for. We believe this will allow operating teams to have incredible transparency across an organization while giving individual specialized operators the ability to move at lightning speed at a fraction of the cost.
Pietra Rewards
Running a business is hard work. So we thought to ourselves: why not reward the heroic founders trying to build their companies. Enter: Pietra Rewards. Now members can get paid for building their business using Pietra. Every time you make a purchase for your business, like sourcing products or packaging, or installing a marketing app on your website, you will be rewarded with cash that you can use to grow your business. This is Pietra’s way of saying, we see you, we appreciate you, and we’ll always do what we can to help our members and their businesses. Rewards are available on all Pietra Memberships starting today.
New shipping and fulfillment rates for members
At Pietra, we’re trying to set the standard for how businesses deal with storage, fulfillment, and shipping. We’re tired of smart operators having to deal with extra fees: receiving fees, pick fees, residential surcharges, – they all suck. At Pietra, we believe in a “what you see is what you pay” model. Starting today, we’re improving our rates on storage, fulfillment, and shipping, so that brands can save big.
Pietra’s rate card can be found here, and it’s public. As far as we can tell, not a single fulfillment center shares public rates like this. But we at Pietra feel very strongly about being transparent. If you’re ever curious about if a Pietra membership is worth it just for fulfillment, worry no more. Here you can see the price difference vs. competitors.
On average, a brand shipping 200 orders/mo will save 45% on fulfillment costs On average, a brand shipping 1000 orders/mo will save 47% on fulfillment costs On average, a brand shipping 5000 orders/mo will save 37% on fulfillment costs
New software & services to help members grow their business
We heard you loud and clear. After you set up your business, you want to grow. Today, we’re launching four new services that business owners can use to help grow their sales.
Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns
Retention is the lifeblood of all eCommerce businesses. Today, we’re excited to announce a new direct mail marketing service that allows you to re-target customers to purchase a second and third time using the power of... regular mail! That’s right. Regular mail is making a comeback. With 20x higher engagement than email, it remains one of the best opportunities to re-engage past customers and increase your customer LTV. Best of all, this service comes as part of your membership and there are no retainer fees.
Video Production Service
Content creation is one of the hardest, most time consuming, and expensive things a brand must do to be relevant in the social media era. Today, Pietra is announcing its content and video production service which allows brands to create content that can be used for social, websites, and advertising. Best of all, this service is included with your Pietra membership. No extra retainer or agency fees.
PR Boxes as a service
As brands grow, we know that it’s incredibly cumbersome to create, assemble, and ship beautiful PR boxes to promote your brand. Whether it’s going to influencers, reporters, or retailers, the idea that you need to hire and agency to complete this task is not right. So today, we’ve brought together all the different parts of Pietra to allow our members to use our PR box service. You can work with vendors to create one of a kind products, custom boxes, and use Pietra’s warehouse to put it all together and automate shipment to the recipient. All without the agency fees, and as always, included with your membership. This service is available to all members on the Full Access plan.
A new world of commerce
At Pietra, we’re constantly trying to provide our members with the best software, services, and infrastructure to take their business to the next level. Over the coming months, we’ll continue to test and roll out even more products and features that help your business save money, and grow your sales. We want to create the first global membership program for eCommerce. A shared community in which business operators from around the world can come together and help each other lower the cost of operating a business, and increase the chances that a business succeeds. For the last decade of eCommerce, you were all alone to figure it out yourself. Now, you have a partner in Pietra, and we’re looking out for you at each step of the way.
I can’t wait to see you all again at Pietra Panorama 2025.
Ronak Trivedi, CEO
Copyright 2024. Pietra, Inc.