Support for sellers in every online marketplace
The 2018 Deloitte Fast 50 overall winner, xSellco, is enjoying explosive growth by helping others to grow their e-commerce operations
If the Fast 50 is all about recognising growth, then it makes sense that first place should go to a business that supports e-commerce all over the world. Clearly the strategy is working for xSellco: the company, which ranked second place in last year’s Fast 50, placed one better in 2018 with a staggering growth rate of 2,874 per cent over the last four years.
xSellco’s connected e-commerce platform helps online sellers of all sizes manage support, feedback and pricing in one place. Centred on a ticketing system, xSellco’s software links into each selling node, and also pulls in data from elsewhere.
“We produce a help-desk product for those who sell online, all e-commerce platforms,” said Ray Nolan, xSellco’s founder.
“People who buy our software tend to be sellers on multiple marketplaces: Amazon, Alibaba and so on, plus their own website.
“The problem with e-commerce is [that] it gets more complex every day: you have to log in to each platform every day, look at the questions, the orders, and so on — and every one is different,” he said.
xSellco dramatically simplifies this, said Nolan: “We centralise the orders and questions and show things like delivery tracking and maps.”
For Nolan, this is the basis of the xSellco philosophy: “We’re about solving tickets whereas others are about responding to and managing tickets.”
Capable of connecting with as many as 90 online e-commerce platform APIs, xSellco also collects information data from twitter and e-mail.
“It can go anywhere where a customer can connect to you,” said Nolan.
Nolan said he has an “obsession” with the quality of his software, something that was also true in his previous company, Hostelworld.
In the end, though, the xSellco proposition remains a straightforward one.
“If you’ve got to answer the phone, that costs a lot of money. In effect, we’re selling time back to our users, and that manifests itself in things like lower staffing costs,” he said.
Founded in 2012 and fully operational from 2014, xSellco’s growth is not only rapid, it is global: 40 per cent of its business is in the United States, 25 per cent is in Britain, and the rest is divided among the rest of the world.
Nolan said that the Fast 50 is a validation precisely because it is an objective measure.
“It’s not subjective; it’s not because someone likes us or likes the model, it’s about the numbers. It’s a very true competition.”
What the Fast 50 is acknowledging, said Nolan, is an Irish technology success story.
“We’re the fastest growing Irish software company, and we’re recruiting heavily. It’s the chance for people to join a very significant company. There aren’t a lot of Irish [start-up] companies that make it in the scheme of things,” he said.
