OpenStore

OpenStore is a provider of commercial services, offering instant liquidity for e-commerce entrepreneurs. This is in part to provide the experience of spontaneous discovery to e-commerce, and bring merchants and customers into a single unified shopping experience through access to data, information, and capital. OpenStore was founded in March 2021 by Keith Rabois, Jack Abraham, Michael Rubenstein, Jeremy Wood, and Matt Lanter.

OpenStore follows a broader consolidation trend in e-commerce, noted more in Amazon sellers that have been acquired by similar companies; however, OpenStore draws on its founders' experience from Opendoor and Atomic in order to offer an algorithm-based acquisition process.

The company is focused on acquiring Shopify-based businesses, with the goal of acquiring one new business day. To do this, the company works to use an automated and mechanical way of identifying Shopify-based business worth acquiring, and for the process of acquiring and integrating that business. OpenStore works to use software to evaluate, price, and make offers on "long-tail" merchants selling through the Shopify platform, and typically with single-digit millions in annual sales. In the case of acquiring a company, OpenStore emphasizes that they completely acquire a business. The company does not offer a venture capital equivalent or any new forms of financing.

OpenStore works by finding founders interested in receiving a bid for their business. These founders or owners fill an online form, which includes certain pieces of data about their business, including Shopify login credentials so OpenStore can verify revenue and other pieces of data. OpenStore, in turn, has developed pricing algorithms to offer a bid within a day, and the algorithm is developed to help identify a strong e-commerce business rather than something unsound.

Once a Shopify-based business has been acquired, OpenStore works to use economies of scale to improve margins on products and reduce prices in order to accelerate adoption of an OpenStore-acquired product portfolio among consumers. This is done in part with the company's software, which works to use data from the collection of acquired brands to better spend on marketing and extract better rates from logistics providers.