The Rise Of Shogun Sparks Hopeful Decline Of Online Marketplace Dominance

E-commerce continues to boom as shoppers become accustomed to socially distanced alternatives to finding their wares. With this boom comes the rise of front-end, e-commerce page builder Shogun whose platform enables businesses to build and design responsive websites with optimised user experience.

Enabling businesses to accessibly design high quality, user friendly and experience-driven websites cheaply is the key to Shogun’s success. The startup does this through two key products, Page Builder, a drag-and-drop page builder for Shopify merchants; and Shogun Frontend, an end-to-end headless commerce solution. It also offers business development to customers. Its ever-expanding business is also constantly building new tech, especially focusing on first-party data and personalisation. With Shogun, businesses of any size can control their own store front without having to fork out the millions that would build websites like Apple’s. Speaking on the company, Finbarr Taylor, the company’s co-founder and CEO shared “we want to help companies build a destination where they can control the experience”.

Helping the company achieve its objectives and keep up with the pace of demand for its growth, Shogun recently received a Series C round of funding. Raising $67.5 million, the company is now valued at $575 million, up significantly from its last round that raised half the capital. This comes from a year of great success where 2020 saw the company’s business grow 182% during the pandemic, with household Fortune 500 brands joining its based of enthusiastic customers. Leading the investment round was first-time investor Insight Partners, who was joined by Initialized Capital, Accel and VMG partners. In total the startup has raised $114.5 million.

Alongside its user-friendly, response driven product, Shogun’s rapid market adoption can largely be attributed to the fact that it delivers on a key determinant of success in e-commerce - speed. Its websites are known for operating very quickly which offers customers a performance advantage in an environment where it takes very little for a shopping cart to be abandoned. Because of this, Page Builder is now used by over 20,000 businesses, up 5,000 from last October.

Shogun’s rise and investment enthusiasm is an exciting signal that the future of e-commerce will be more independently driven, with the experience curated by the brands themselves. With the success of this, the marketplace model will likely decline, decreasing the monopolies of companies like Amazon.