Retailys, a company developing eponymous e-commerce omnichannel system facilitating commercial expansion throughout Europe, has in May completed an investment round raising 2 million USD from a group of European investors and has had a yearly growth of 220%.

According to a market research company eMarketer, the global e-commerce turnover has reached the value 4.2 billion USD in 2020, which is a yearly increase of more than 25%. The interest of many retailers in expanding throughout Europe grows even faster, however it is often met with obstacles having to do with adjusting to various local conditions in different regions and creating online stores aimed at foreign countries. To overcome these obstacles is the purpose of Retailys, a company with roots in the Czech Republic and Singapore, a company whose mission it is to enable retailers to sell all over Europe.

“Retailys differs from traditional e-commerce platforms, which tend to focus mainly on creating domestic online stores, in that it provides retailers with tools necessary to expand their online businesses abroad and create online stores in multiple countries. The retailer can create and manage fully localised online stores and other sales channels (including now so popular online marketplaces) all in a single system. All the data about the products, customers, and orders coming from all over Europe can be managed form a single simple administration environment. The whole systm thus not only saves an enormous amount of time and money it would otherwise take to develop one’s own internal e-commerce system, but it also saves the retailer from the need to think about the local particularities (local customs, payment methods, logistics, etc.) of various markets, as these are already taken care of when an online store is created through Retailys.” These are the benefits of the system as described by Petr Heller, founder and CEO of the company. Tens of millions of dollars’ worth of goods is currently sold each month through the online stores and other sales channels managed by Retailys and given the current rate of growth the total turnover on the platform should surpass one billion dollars in the next year. In the past three years, Retailys has been quickly growing its position on the market. Just after its inception the project was chosen into an acceleration program in Singapore, run by a governmental agency CzechInvest. Singapore is where Retailys founded its second foreign branch, the first being in London, and it is currently also active in Germany. The company has won several awards, such as the Digital company of the year award in 2019, awarded by the Association of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. Moreover, hundreds of European companies have already participated in seminars and courses on the topic of international e-commerce, which Retailys organises, either alone or in cooperation with other organisations.

“Retailys and its founder are the rising stars of the software infrastructure for e-retail sector in Europe. This sector is growing in turbo mode not only due to COVID-19 but more importantly due to general transition of commerce from brick-and-mortar stores into e-commerce and due to the growth in interest in commercial expansion abroad. What I value in Retailys is mainly its drive and its high-quality club of investors, who come from many different and interesting areas, which we have managed to assemble over a relatively short period of time of a few months. Moreover, the truly global scope of the project is among the reasons why I have decided to be among the first to invest.” Thus, Michael Rostock – Poplar, a renown start-up investor who started and helped to coordinate the most recent investment round, sums up the reasons behind his investment. Other important investors include for example Ondrej Smolar, founder of a multinational IT company Soitron, or a group of entrepreneurs and top managers of several important multinational companies, including Citibank, Tieto, and Volkswagen.

“The next few years will be a great challenge for Retailys. On top of the quick growth in technology and personnel in the region of central Europe, where we are active mainly in Germany and the Czech Republic, we plan to open branches in other countries. In London and Singapore, where we are  also active, we will need to increase personnel as well.  We would like to go from about twenty employees we currently have to about three times that before the end of the next year.  Businesses have come to realise, recently due to the pandemic, that selling online has become a key sales channel of any company. We provide them with the opportunity to take their online business to the next level, where not only can they sell through their local online store but where they can use a true omnichannel solution and so gain the ability to sell through online sales channels anywhere in Europe!” sums up Petr Heller and adds that thanks to the technological solutions which Retailys develops, the simple and effective tools for commercial expansion abroad become available not only to the largest of companies but also to any sufficiently ambitious small and medium-sized enterprise, as the price of the basic package for European expansion begins at as little as 100 USD per month.