[ From left: Badazoom’s COO Clark Mickel, senior software developer Warren Savich, junior software developer Jim Niemiec and CTO Eric Newhuis. Photo provided. ]
Greenville native Clark Mickel thinks you like finding exactly what you want, when you want it, while shopping online.
South Carolina investors – to the tune of a $4 million projected investment round – seem to agree.
“We couldn’t find a site that serves our needs – or anyone else’s needs, for that matter,” said Mickel, concept co-founder and COO of Badazoom, which he describes as a vendor-neutral consumer electronics site. “It really came out of the frustrations that come from being unable to find exactly what you’re looking for, and then being unsure if you’re looking at the same product across different tabs.”
With many online marketplaces, search results are skewed towards items that need to be cleared from stock or have higher profit margins. Badazoom, he said, earns a commission on sales from traffic coming from the site to retailers and manufacturers, but says the site logic doesn’t take that revenue into account when delivering search results.
“As far we can tell, we’re the only ones doing unbiased search, and that means we don’t rank our search on anything but pure relevancy,” he said. “The logic is actually quite different from places like Amazon.”
An initial investment round of $300,000 was enough to pay Badazoom’s four-person team when they began work in January, along with three – soon to be four – contractors, Mickel said. Now, the company is in the middle of its second round of investment, which he expects to come in at $4 million.
“Really, we go a little bit further than other sites do, because we bring in all the big names you’re familiar with as well as all the smaller ones that you may have never heard of,” said the former TipHive employee. “Our ability to represent products from retailers and manufacturers is really unlimited.”
Today, the site’s Web crawlers focus on consumer electronics, which Mickel said the team chose to begin with due to size and growth projections. Ecommerce sales of U.S. consumer electronics was $66.4 billion in 2014, for example, but is expected to double to $108.4 million by 2018, according to digital marketing research firm eMarketer.
“Electronics is a very fragmented space,” said Mickel, who hopes to reach 200,000 registered users (it’s free) by the end of the holiday season. “We’re open to the idea of expansion down the road, but right now we need to focus.”
