Maropost, an email and cross-channel engagement vendor serving B2C brands, has entered the ecommerce field, offering a storefront supported by Google Cloud Platform.

The impetus came largely from customers who had been working with services like Shopify and Magento and spending excessive time on the integrations, according to Maropost founder and CEO Ross Andrew Paquette.

“It’s a natural progression in the commerce space,” Paquette says. Firms are “cutting down on the number of vendors they’re using,” he adds.

In line with that, Maropost announced this week that it has joined the Google Cloud Partner Program, providing its clients with Google Cloud’s infrastructure and machine learning. It also has migrated its own infrastructure to the Global Cloud Platform to facilitate scaling up of resources. 

Clients can use the engagement and ecommerce platforms independently or blended together. Some firms have legacy data and find it convenient to remain with their old vendors, Paquette notes.

However, he says brands “don’t really want to have a significant development team working on third-party integration. There’s no control over functionality.”

The main component of the new platform is the unification of customer data. Beyond purchasing, it tracks engagement and identifies the top-performing groups. It also can make product recommendations. 

Ecommerce providers face unique infrastructure challenges when launching a product or during a holiday promotion — even a .01% downtime carries a great cost, the company says. Using Google to power the storefront can prevent this from happening, it adds. 

In addition, the platform can personalize and upsell via trigger emails and target based on optimal open times, according to Paquette. It can also personalize based on time zones, he adds. 

The ecommerce platform has been in beta for over a year, and “we’ve done a couple of pivots based on customer feedback,” Paquette continues. 

The company is six-and-a-half years old. It is headquartered in Toronto and has offices in Chicago and Chandigahr, India, and altogether, has 165 employees.