Big brands like Kimberly-Clark, Kellogg's and Nestle are tapping into this machine-learning startup to help them crack Amazon

REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the Economic Club of Washington DC's "Milestone Celebration Dinner."

• Startup Boomerang Commerce is helping brands sell products on Amazon with a new platform called CommerceIQ.
• The platform uses machine-learning to scrape data signals and unify sales, marketing, operations and competitor data to automate recommendations.
• Companies like Kimberly-Clark, Bayer Healthcare, Kellogg's, Mars, Kraft Heinz and Nestlé are already using the platform.

As Amazon grows as an advertising platform, one startup is helping big brands cash in on it.

Five-year-old Boomerang Commerce uses machine learning to help online retailers automate tasks like supply-chain management, inventory planning, and price-tracking.

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Now, the company has started to help big brands conquer Amazon, with a new platform called CommerceIQ.

The pitch is, the platform uses machine learning to scrape data signals and uses sales, marketing, operations and competitor data to automate brands' programmatic advertising on Amazon. Brands can also use it to identify high-value keywords on consumer searches in their categories and estimate their competitors' spend and share of search on Amazon Marketing Services.

"Kellogg's has been selling cereal for hundreds of years and that hasn't changed. The manual techniques they used in retail don't work for e-commerce," Guru Hariharan, Boomerang Commerce's CEO, told Business Insider. "Amazon is writing the blueprint for e-commerce, which is changing commerce in general."

Big brands like Kellogg's and Mars use CommerceIQ

The company began testing CommerceIQ with a few companies in mid-2018 and is now rolling it out widely. Advertisers that are already using it include Kimberly-Clark, Bayer Healthcare, Kellogg's, Mars, Kraft Heinz and Nestlé.

Kellogg's used CommerceIQ to help teams like sales, marketing, operations and supply chain work better together.

"Each of our teams [get their] own view that shows their own recommendations and actions that are specific to their function," said Andrew Freeman, Kellogg's global director of e-commerce. "CommerceIQ has helped take us from
where we were in the manual, disconnected, siloed concept more to the connected, automated hub concept."

Brands have seen added return on investment; a 3% to 12% increase in top-line growth; and 25% to 50% increase in efficiency through the automated platform, according to Boomerang Commerce.

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Some are using the CommerceIQ platform to automate their advertising on Amazon.

A leading consumer packaged goods brand, for example, was routinely running out of three of its top 10 products, costing it millions of dollars a year in lost revenue. While its supply chain team was aware of the problem, its marketing team was not, so it kept running sponsored product ads for these product, according to Hariharan.

Using CommerceIQ, said Hariharan, the brand now only bids for ads on products that are in-stock, and gets an alert to pause Amazon campaigns for products when inventory is running low. This helps them avoid out-of-stock issues, which Amazon's algorithms penalizes brands for in their organic search ranking.

Boomerang Commerce has raised $20.5 million in funding, most recently raising $12 million in a B-round on January 14, 2016.