In the last few years as the ecommerce industry has exploded, a new class of companies: "ecommerce aggregators" or “ecommerce rollups" have risen. These ecommerce aggregators consolidate private label brands in various ecommerce platforms and marketplaces like Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce and more.

Similar to traditional private equity "rollups", these companies typically find profitable e-commerce product categories, look for synergies across brands and consolidate companies in these categories. Then, they focus on growing them collectively using a combination of shared technology, expertise, infrastructure, capital and more. Some of the bigger players in the space include Thrasio (acquired over 100+ brands), Heyday, Perch, Una Brands, OpenStore and more. These companies have collectively raised billions of dollars in the last year alone.

Several of these companies leverage Rutter to not only grow faster by making more data driven acquisitions but to also manage these brands and help them grow faster. Below are the top use cases that brand aggregator companies use the Rutter Universal API for.

1. Data Driven Acquisition - These aggregator companies similar to investment funds look at hundreds of companies but only acquire a few brands a quarter, so they are very careful about which brands they decide to acquire. Rutter’s Orders, Products and Customers API allow data teams at these rollup companies to better understand their merchants by gaining access to historical sales, inventory, customer, payouts and marketing data.
2. Brand Management - At scale, rollup companies start to build internal tooling including centralized inventory management tools that make it easy to maintain inventory, list catalog items and update items across different channels. Through Rutter’s Orders and Products API, they are able to easily manage their inventory and catalog programmatically and build these internal tools faster without having to worry about maintaining several integrations across platforms that their brands are on.
3. Channel Reporting & Analytics - As brand aggregators, these companies need to understand how their various brands are performing across different channels and what cross channel and cross brand interaction look like. Rutter’s Universal API helps these companies to pull a historical view of the most important data points that allow them to understand the performance and health of their bands and answer key analytics questions. For example, with Rutter’s Customer API, they can understand who their repeat purchases are, the lifetime value of their customers and which customers they could retarget for their several brands.
4. Launching in New Marketplaces - Rutter’s comprehensive API coverage across platforms and marketplaces allow these companies to expand the market that their brands can sell to. Today, customers use Rutter’s Create Order APIs to manage their catalog in new marketplaces and sync their inventory across platforms as well.

Enabling all of these use cases require these businesses to invest resources in building out their internal tooling and technology platform to manage the end to end lifecycle of brands they’re acquiring. Rutter servers as the infrastructure that enables these "rollup companies" to easily gain access to the data needed to power these platforms and the growth of these companies. This enables them to save hundreds of hours with Rutter and are able to move 10x faster, allowing them to focus on acquiring the best brands and growing their topline.

The ecommerce aggregator and rollup industry continues to evolve with billions in venture funding raised in the last year. We’re excited to continue finding ways to power the future of the ecommerce industry. If you’re interested in learning about any of the above use cases or have other use cases for Rutter, let us know!