Australian e-commerce company, Awayco has raised $11 million to help retailers offer retail, rental and appointment experiences to consumers. The investment round, led by Thorney Investment Group and high-net-worth individuals, enables Awayco to scale its suite of e-commerce applications and grow its local team.
The Awayco platform was initially piloted with retailers including Patagonia in the United States, and now hundreds of retailers including PETstock, Star Discount Pharmacy, Cheap as Chips and Firewire Surfboards are using Awayco software to power their retail operations.
Currently, retailers who want to serve the modern consumer face challenges connecting and unifying physical and digital e-commerce channels, which can lead to fragmented experiences and a costly tech stack. Awayco aims to solve this challenge with a unified e-commerce solution that includes retail Point of Sale (POS), rental and appointments to offer consumers new and second-hand products and services to buy, book and rent on any platform.
Awayco founder and executive board member, Gideon Gut-Silverman said Awayco was started in 2018 as a rental software business focused on the circular economy. “Like many other businesses Covid forced us to reconsider our strategy. Through discussions with retailers we recognised that store closures were making consumers think differently about e-commerce. Having served the rental market, we saw that it wasn’t a big leap to offer a unified solution that addressed the bigger picture of what the modern consumer wants.
“We learned it was important that our solution worked within a retailer’s existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and POS system, so that our customers didn’t have to undertake massive capex before we showed value. We’re working with retailer customers to consolidate and manage inventory, aggregate data, and unify transactions across any platform and channel, so they can offer innovative experiences based on consumer demand.”
Awayco has acquired Australian point-of-sale (POS) retailer, Barcode Solutions, which brings 35 years of industry knowledge and expertise of Shanti Kumar, who will be taking the reins as CEO of Awayco POSConnex.
POSConnex is Awayco’s unified e-commerce solution for growing retailers which enables them to launch and grow retail, rental and appointment offerings on websites, apps and marketplaces, with unified customer, inventory and transaction records across those systems and tailor personalised offerings.
“By using customer data in a thoughtful way, retailers will not only be successful in building customer loyalty, they can differentiate themselves from their competitors,” Kumar said.