A startup aiming to present a trustworthy alternative to Amazon has secured funding to capitalise on an existing market gap. PrettyDamnQuick (PDQ) offers technology to retailers, allowing them to customise and evaluate various shipping and checkout experiences. Recently, the company accomplished a significant feat: securing $25 million in a Series A funding round to enhance its operations.
Since its inception in 2020, New York-based PDQ has onboarded approximately 200 customers, and it currently manages around 30 million orders monthly. This equates to an impressive $4 billion in gross merchandise volume thus far. The firm anticipates processing 300 million orders by the conclusion of 2025.
PDQ’s fundraising achievements and growth come amid ongoing scrutiny of the e-commerce sector.
After a surge in rapid growth post-COVID-19 pandemic, numerous companies and investors noted a significant decline in demand as consumers returned to physical stores. This trend was exacerbated by inflation and economic unpredictability, which prompted reduced consumer spending.
For those seeking a silver lining, recent data from the holiday shopping season presented a mixed picture: certain shopping days were exceptionally robust, yet overall growth fell short of forecasts.
Nonetheless, enterprises like PDQ may find opportunities in these conditions: providing consumers with attractive discounts while ensuring minimal impact on retailers’ profit margins could prove increasingly appealing.
The core issue that PDQ addresses is familiar to independent e-commerce retailers.
Essentially, e-commerce firms are predominantly retailers rather than technology experts. Many who prefer to delegate their technology needs often select solutions like Amazon, wherein they can list products on its marketplace and leverage its search capabilities, fulfilment, shipping, loyalty programmes, and other services for a fee. However, various alternatives have emerged, including Temu, Instagram, TikTok, and others.
PDQ focuses on e-commerce businesses that prefer to cultivate their own online identity. This aligns with the independent spirit that has fostered the growth of platforms like Shopify—facilitating the development of online storefronts—and Stripe—managing transaction processing.
PDQ is tackling another essential aspect of this ecosystem: the setup and management of the overall checkout experience, which encompasses shipping costs, options, and promotional deals designed to encourage additional purchases.
Avi Moskowitz, the CEO and founder of PDQ, conceived the startup’s idea from his personal experience in establishing and managing a craft brewing venture in Israel.
Launched in 2015, BeerBazaar transitioned online in early 2020. “Not anticipating what was coming,” Moskowitz remarked, “we decided to build a website using Shopify.”
Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
“Suddenly, we found ourselves processing hundreds of orders daily, with some days exceeding 1,000 orders,” he recalled. What could have been an exhilarating surge in business quickly turned into a daunting challenge. Both his business and its clients were astonished by the absence of the Amazon-like shopping experience that had become so familiar.
Determined to amend this deficiency for BeerBazaar, Moskowitz aimed to instil “the same trust and confidence” in online shopping that customers would find on Amazon: providing reliable shipping information, potential reductions in shipping costs, or even free shipping.
“As we began to develop a solution for ourselves, we recognised that many emerging e-commerce tools, such as personalisation, optimisation, and A/B testing, necessitate a platform,” he explained. “Optimising the checkout process involves managing the complete customer journey, from entry into the store to checkout, fulfilment, tracking, and delivery.”
After creating that platform, Moskowitz deemed it a robust concept worthy of broader distribution, thus founding PDQ. Currently, the company’s integration is limited to online stores developed on Shopify, but there are plans to utilise a portion of the funding for expansion to other platforms.
PDQ’s foremost aim is personalisation, as stated by Moskowitz: “Essentially, each shopper can have a tailored checkout experience.”
If a retailer has existing partnerships for order management, shipping, and payment, PDQ orchestrates those processes on a unified platform. For retailers who do not handle fulfilment internally or have third-party logistics (3PL) partners, PDQ offers an interface compatible with a wide range of prominent carriers (USPS, DHL, FedEx, UPS, etc.) as well as various smaller delivery companies and other 3PL service providers.
Other services provided by PDQ include tools for checkout, order tracking, purchase protection, and A/B testing for retailers wishing to experiment with different checkout offers.
Several companies also address this particular aspect of the e-commerce pipeline, including Shopify itself and many of PDQ’s integration partners. Like many sectors within e-commerce that aim to resolve a fragmented market, it is anticipated that numerous competitors will develop compelling offerings that can exist concurrently.
The primary competition consists of platforms such as Amazon and other entities providing alternative solutions for retailers: essentially encouraging a migration to larger marketplaces that eliminate the necessity to consider independent products altogether.
To date, the company has raised $38 million in funding, though it has not disclosed its valuation following this round, led by new investor PeakSpan Capital, with participation from previous supporters TLV Partners and Moneta.