An interview with Scayle Commerce Engine cofounder and MD, Tarek Muller, and head of Solution Consulting, Rico Adler, on Scayle‘s founder story, business strategy, product vision and ecommerce philosophy.
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Tl;dr
- The founder story behind Scayle Commerce Engine
- Under the hood of Scayle’s technology stack
- Business strategy, vision and product roadmap
Our regular listeners will know that we keep a keen eye on the ecommerce tech scene. Whilst sources like Gartner’s Magic Quadrants shouldn’t be taken as the gospel, they do provide a useful benchmark for changes in the ecommerce vendor landscape.
A new entrant to the UK market has pushed into Gartner’s reckoning in 2023. Scayle Commerce Engine has a strong pedigree in Germany and other parts of mainland Europe. MD Tarek Muller is also the cofounder of one of Germany’s largest ecommerce retailers, About You, which sells 400k+ products from 2k+ brands, generating €5 billion annual sales revenue.
The technology that underpins About You was spun out to create Scayle, providing a PaaS solution to other retailers including Deichmann, Otto Group and Depot. Targeted at larger retailers with a GMV of £100m+, the platform has already proven it’s capability at scale.
For this episode we’re joined by Tarek, who shares insights on the business strategy, vision and philosophy, and Rico Adler, Head of Solution Consulting At Scayle.
Discussion notes
- Firstly, please could you introduce yourselves and give our listeners a summary of the story behind SCAYLE, why you decided to enter the platform game and not just focus on retail ecommerce
- Tarek, can you give us a sense of how big SCAYLE is? Perhaps you could share some numbers as I know this was spun out of a billion euro plus retailer.
- Let’s start with your GTM strategy: many of your German customers are really large omnichannel or large catalogue retailers. Is this the type of business Scayle is aimed at and what type of business doesn’t it suit, as I think you said the focus is retailers over £100m?
- Scayle has a German heritage but is ramping up its business in the UK: why the UK now, and why do you think the UK needs another platform to choose from?
- Scayle is headless by design: why did you go down this route instead of offering a templating engine and themes?
- Customers can choose whatever front-end stack they want but you’ve also built your own front-end framework that clients can use, using NuxtJS and Vue.js – how advanced is this, what is already built that customers can use and repurpose vs. what do customers need to build themselves?
- It’s fair to say a core strength is omnichannel, you have £bn+ retailers using these features. A key challenge with omnichannel selling is handling logic for store level stock availability and order routing. Typically how much of the order management orchestration for these merchants is handled by Scayle vs. handed off to ERPs or other back office systems?
- You also offer your own PIM; is this focused on product management for ecommerce, or does it also provide key features of other enterprise PIMs like DAM, product data feeds, Supplier portals for asset downloads etc.?
- Whilst you have pre-existing integrations, you’re not planning a big app exchange like Shopify or Adobe. Which ecommerce areas are you focused on for these integrations, as it currently looks like ERP, payment and CMS and are key strengths, whereas personalisation, loyalty and customer services isn’t a focus?
- How does the cost model work, we understand the licence fee is 0.5% or does it vary based on business size, GMV and order volume? What other costs can merchants expect from Scayle during a project?
- What’s your approach to SIs in the UK, as currently you’re working with Astound who many will know but you’re also intending to expand this quickly. What can we expect in the next 12 months?
- What does the future look like for SCAYLE: what ambitions do you have for the company and the product?
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