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In an ecommerce-buzzing era, there’s a need for sleeker, smoother transactions. Automating mundane tasks that require manual labor with a SaaS platform is an efficient way to work. Sara Du, co-founder and CEO of Alloy Automation, discusses Alloy’s initial goals of making workflow automation tools accessible to those less fluent in programming languages—a no-code platform. A “Switzerland” of tools, she describes Alloy as a non-aligned platform in the ecommerce SaaS ecosystem. Read on to understand Alloy’s approach, which goes beyond a single end-goal; its current stack; and its hopes to optimize the many possibilities within the vast-growing vertical of ecommerce. Science becomes serendipitous when the solution tools you develop fit a rising need!

The following interview was conducted by Sacra— January 2022

Background

Sara Du is co-founder and CEO of Alloy, an integration and automation platform for ecommerce. We talked with Sara to learn more about two major trends that Alloy sits at the intersection of: (1) headless ecommerce and the long tail of apps that allow developers to create custom ecommerce experiences across Shopify, BigCommerce, Webflow and other platforms and (2) no code platforms like Zapier that enable data portability and interoperability across the apps you use in your business.

1. Let’s start with context and the problem Alloy is solving.

2. What does that stack look like as far as what all those apps are? And relatedly, what are the most common integrations and use cases for Alloy for ecommerce?

3. From your perspective, is there a single source of truth that people use for customer info? Would it be like a Shopify Storefront or maybe more of a marketing platform like Klaviyo?

4. Going back to what Alloy does, what exactly does it entail to have a verticalized Zapier for ecomm? Why would you need a 30-step integration versus two or three? What would that be used for?

5. Theoretically, Zapier could build some sort of verticalized product like this. Do you see that as plausible, and why or why not?

6. You alluded to educating customers there. How do you think about customer acquisition generally? If you use Shopify App Store, how do you think about that?

7. I love that App Store drama.

8. How do you think about the threat of native integrations? Are there situations where people might prefer to have a middleware, logic-controlling layer from another product, or is it that native integrations aren’t happening at the necessary scale?

9. On that point, Zapier incentivized a lot of folks to build their own integrations early on with the promise of all this traffic you would get if you became a Zapier integration. Given that Alloy is relatively small compared to Zapier, do you build integrations yourselves, or is there an incentive for companies to build their own integrations?

10.  Shopify Flow seems somewhat similar to what you’re working on at Alloy. How do you think about the differences and why folks might choose one over the other? Do you see a trend of people not wanting to build everything on Shopify and get locked onto that platform?

11.  How do you see the concept of an app store with something like Shopify versus an Alloy integration marketplace? How do you think about the differences?

12.  Do you have any native actions? Zapier has all these in-built functions that do relatively simple things — one that comes to mind is forms — and something that's come up with folks a fear that their product will be commoditized into a native action in Zapier.

13.  Why aren’t people in ecommerce using tools like Segment already? Is it just that they’re not technically sophisticated?

14.  You mentioned headless. Do you see headless, Jamstack, this kind of stuff, as a tailwind, where folks might be more inclined to use something like Alloy if they are building their own site and then delegating various duties to APIs like Shopify versus building on Shopify directly?

15.  Somewhat similarly, do you see no-code as an important trend? People potentially building sites on Airtable, Webflow, Alloy instead of Airtable, Zapier, Webflow, that kind of thing.

16.  Circling back to the long-term vision, I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts about the decision to go horizontal versus more vertical.

17.  How do you think about the trend of white labeling integrations? What’s the strategic value for you of having Alloy as well as a white labeled version of Alloy?