Paloma: (www.getpaloma.com)

HQ: New York, NY

Co-Founders: Kelsey Hunter, Zach Podbela

The problem: Brands are quickly adopting direct messaging (via mobile or social platform, like Facebook) as an instrumental sales channel. Consumers appreciate a seamless, convenient shopping experience, and merchants welcome the higher conversion rates they get from this hyper-personalized experience.

It’s true — messaging platforms actually drive higher conversion rates than the e-commerce sites themselves. For context, over 10 billion messages are sent on Facebook Messenger between individual consumers and businesses monthly. Additionally, 56.8% of Instagram sales come from DMs.

So despite the potential sales success of DMs, and an abundance of marketing and support tools — the commerce infrastructure to support the unique transactions of 1:1 messaging driven storefronts is lacking. Manually managing it all (between live chat and payment links) isn’t scalable. And not streamlining operations causes missed revenue opportunities and insights gleaned from these shopping experiences.

Meet Paloma: Paloma enables brands to use messaging platforms (like Facebook and Instagram) as robust sales channels — to not only get revenue, but gain actionable insights. Here’s how it works: the accounts integrate with Paloma, pull from a library of automated responses tailored to customer needs, and then direct them to resources, products, and/or live support. Today, Paloma provides a drag-and-drop store builder (which takes just minutes to set up), a robust CRM tool, and reporting tool on orders & purchasing behavior, which allows brands to decrease their acquisition costs and increase their conversion rates.

So, what does this all really mean? By starting with an easy DM, Paloma routes customers quickly to the most relevant resources, products, and live agent support, making for a better experience, and ultimately, increasing conversion rates (because a happy shopper is one who’s more likely to spend). Brand customers have a more personal experience and from each customer response, clients gain insights so they can better understand their sales funnel, optimize their site, products, and beyond, to build toward even more revenue.

Why we’re betting on it:  Social commerce and mobile purchasing are growing rapidly in the US and globally, and businesses are re-positioning their sales channels to be messaging-first. Just as WeChat, which facilitated $2.5B transactions in 2020. U.S. Retail social commerce sales are expected to hit $36.1B this year.

Paloma is the all-in-one gamechanger needed to keep this trend moving. It’s the platform that sets up these companies with message-based digital storefronts, full e-commerce capabilities *and* churns out valuable data on their buyers’ behavior? Paloma has quickly become the leader in leveraging Messenger for sales, consistently driving 2-10x higher conversion rates for top digitally-native brands like Joybird, Lalo, M.Gemi, ThirdLove, Caraway, Care/Of, Thread Wallets, Framebridge and more.

The powerful and complementary duo behind Paloma has an unmatched passion for the future of social commerce, which just makes the product that much better. The company was founded in 2017 by Kelsey Hunter, whose strong background in marketing and UX/UI and business acumen has continually impressed us each time we meet. Last summer, she brought on Zach Podbela as co-founder and CTO to help with future expansion.

The platforms they rally behind are taking note — Kelsey recently presented at Facebook’s annual Developer’s F8 conference where she announced Paloma’s new storefront feature for Instagram enabling Instagram Direct Shopping. 

Our take: While Paloma’s growth so far has been impressive, this is just the start of the journey. As the future of social commerce continues to evolve, we’re excited for Paloma to power even more storefront and checkout workflows, expand messaging commerce in other social channels, and revolutionize the entire shopping experience for sellers.

Paloma is actively hiring for engineering, design, and growth to join the team. Learn more about open roles here.