Shogun Brings Big Retail Tech To Digital-First Retailers

Don’t read too much into the name.

Yes, a Shogun was a feudal lord in 16th century Japan who commanded rival military units. It is also the title of an epic 1,200-page novel by James Clavell, which has sold more than 12 million copies so far.

When he first came up with the idea for an eCommerce technology company, Co-founder and CEO Finbarr Taylor was in the process of plowing through this story of medieval Japan. He needed a name for the company and liked the book. A new Shogun was born.

Four years and $35 million in venture capital funding later, Taylor’s company is expanding and simplifying the ability for eCommerce companies to build sophisticated yet simple web stores. Taylor said he doesn’t want to read too much into the name, but if a comparison was forced, it would be along the lines of detail. Clavell laid out exquisite details of life in feudal Japan so that the readers could live it as well as read it, according to The New York Times’ review of the book. Shogun the company makes the details of running an eCommerce site easy enough for its users to live and profit from despite the deep technology that powers it.

“Some retailers are just excellent about telling stories about themselves and about the products that they’re selling,” Taylor told PYMNTS. “You go on their websites, and it feels like you’re buying these products to allow you to adopt a better lifestyle. But a lot of them are not so great at the technology and understanding how to actually build pages and handle the front end as well as the back end of their business. If brands want to get online, and you want to have something that looks bespoke, that’s typically going to mean paying a developer or paying an agency quite a bit of money. Or you could find a tool like ours and customize and optimize on your own.”

The simple version of a complicated story is that Shogun has created a technology that enables state-of-the-art eCommerce tech usually reserved for bigger companies like headless commerce and progressive web applications. It integrates on top of platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

The reason retailers find it easy to use, and the company’s unique value proposition, is that it builds and optimizes online storefronts in a no-code environment. It has two core products: Page Builder, an eCommerce-focused drag-and-drop page builder, and Frontend, an end-to-end “headless commerce” solution with content management tools and fast page-loading performance.

In October it received $35 million in new funding, which Taylor said is necessary to handle increased demand from direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands and traditionally offline brands needing to engage directly with their customers. It will be used to scale their platform and build out sales and marketing, executive and engineering teams.

“With COVID in particular, we saw this almost overnight boom with smaller, independent businesses coming on,” Taylor said. “We’ve seen a lot of businesses where they didn’t have any online presence, starting up, getting online and making sales in a very short period of time. And we were very keen on enabling those kinds of people because our tools are designed for marketers, agencies and other non-technical people to tell the stories that they need to tell.”

Shogun currently counts over 15,000 eCommerce brands, including local mom-and-pop upstarts, to leading D2C brands like Leesa, MVMT, Timbuk2 and Chubbies, to household Fortune 500 brands.

A good example of how Shogun works can be seen with Leesa, which is a relatively new D2C mattress brand that was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in customer acquisition every year. It needed a new way to engage the nearly 350,000 monthly unique visitors. Those customer acquisition costs were rising, and efficiencies were dropping when it engaged Shogun.

The Shogun product suite introduced a self-managing content tool that freed up resources to develop more site features that helped capture more customers and more conversions. Its “store sync” was particularly helpful. It enables companies like Leesa to import their product data during an expansion to a new region.

“The syncing feature has been huge when we roll out a store in a new region,” a Leesa spokesperson said. “We’ve been able to cut down the development time to launch a new region from six to seven months to two weeks. The syncing feature alone is a game-changer for us. We’ve saved an incredible amount of time and resources using syncing to roll out to new regions.”

Headless commerce and progressive web applications (PWA) are two of the more technical capabilities in the Shogun tool kit. Both have been key developments to helping retailers participate in the digital-first economy. Headless commerce is basically a technology that allows consumers to go from the product page to checkout without having to load a lot of pages in between, which adds friction to the eCommerce process. PWA enables eCommerce companies to have faith that their headless commerce sites will render properly on mobile devices. It all leads to a faster, better customer experience.

“The result is that you end up with as an extremely fast, extremely scalable website that performs incredibly well on mobile, and what we see is that for the really successful merchants, the majority of their traffic is on mobile,” Taylor said. “But the majority of their sales are on desktop, which tells you that their conversion rate on desktop is much higher. A big part of the reason for that is slow loading on mobile. And so progressive web apps are ways to combat this slow loading on mobile. So, we’re kind of combining together those two trends, headless commerce and PWA. And then the third major trend is no-code, which is enabling merchants and marketers to do this on their own.”