Mobile Web Add-On Brow.si Raises $1M, Partners With PrestaShop To Help M-Commerce Stick

MySiteApp, the Israeli startup behind mobile website add-on Brow.si, has raised a further $1 million from existing investors thetime and a number of U.S./Israel-based angels, bringing the total backing for the company to $3.2 million. The additional funding will be used to help the company double down on further integrations with third-party CMS and e-commerce platforms.

To that end, Brow.si is also announcing a decent partner win today through a tie-up with open source e-commerce platform, PrestaShop. It follows existing integrations with a range of CMS software, including Drupal, Joomla and Blogger, as well as being a WordPress VIP feature partner.

Specifically, the partnership with PrestaShop promises to be a boon for m-commerce, with support for Brow.si making it easy to bring a range of engagement features to e-commerce on mobile — the whole premise of Brow.si is that mobile sites that install the add-on are able to offer functionality that rivals ‘native’ apps, such as social sharing, a “read it later” button, subscriptions, and push notifications in the form of a bridge between mobile sites utilising the add-on and the Brow.si Reader iOS app.

PrestaShop-powered stores that use the Brow.si add-on get a floating menu that provides users access to the Brow.si functionality in a consistent way across all pages of the merchant’s store. This includes site-wide search, a social-sharing button to let shoppers share product pages and other store content across multiple social networks, “save for later” options (Pocket, Readability, and Brow.si’s own Reader), “push notifications” and an app-like mobile shopping cart.

In the near future Brow.si says it will roll out additional features, such as targeted coupons, “hot deals,” and product recommendations.

“All these features are available from anywhere on the store when it is accessed from a mobile device, and represent new capabilities/ways for merchants to bring focus back to key assets in their stores and make it easier for mobile shoppers to engage with their products/brand, navigate through the store and make a purchase,” explains the company.

Or to put it more simply, this is about combatting shopping cart abandonment, not least because of a shoddy mobile experience, as well as drumming up more business by lowering the barriers to sharing product pages.

To help support this, PrestaShop merchants get access to analytics that include engagement metrics to give them insights about their mobile customers and the performance of the store.