Sara Du, co-founder and CEO of Alloy, on building the Switzerland of ecommerce software

our game is to be the connective tissue and the one API for the ecommerce ecosystem

[Shopify apps]  see us as a channel to then also enable connections to other ecommerce apps. With Zapier, those connections aren't going to be deep, so you can't enable as many use cases.

We’re the Switzerland of the ecosystem and we don’t have an end goal for using your data, it just flows through.

We have a resource we’re updating constantly to give brands a sense of top tools in each layer of the stack.For automation on Alloy, we see a lot of recurring names like Gorgias and ReCharge, but also we’re usually the first to meet up and coming players as well

[The Shopify app Store is] just not a great place to do distribution anymore. If you go on today, you’ll see Facebook and Google at the top, which doesn’t make sense if you want to improve app discoverability.