How Merchkit accelerates sales by removing integration uncertainty
February 21, 2025
Learn how Merchkit, an AI-powered image generation and e-commerce enrichment platform, partnered with Unified.to to confidently pursue new customers without worrying about integration bottlenecks slowing down their sales pipeline.
Summary
Product Category: AI-powered product image generation and e-commerce enrichment platform
Use Case: Connect with e-commerce platforms and PIM/DAM systems to generate digital assets for retailers
Time to First Integration: 2-3 weeks
Engineers Required: 1 engineer
Key Challenge: Integrating within a complex e-commerce ecosystem with numerous APIs
Primary Benefit: Ability to confidently pursue sales without integration slowdowns
The challenge: selling in a complex e-commerce ecosystem
The e-commerce landscape is vast and complex, with data scattered across countless platforms and systems. For Merchkit, whose AI platform processes massive datasets to generate high-quality product images and descriptions, this presented a formidable challenge. Each new user represented not only a sales opportunity but also a new potential integration hurdle — different data models to learn, new APIs to master, and weeks of integration development work.
With a small engineering team, Merchkit faced a critical dilemma: each new sales opportunity risked turning into weeks of integration work, pulling engineers away from core product development. Building custom integrations for each platform wouldn't just slow them down - it would make their entire sales process dependent on engineering bandwidth.
"E-commerce data is inherently complex because it spans across a huge range of domains in retail. With so many companies and platforms out there, having the ability to go to one place and manage one set of integrations to access all these different platforms is critical."
Bijan Vaez, Co-founder & CEO
From integration bottleneck to sales accelerator
Merchkit found their answer in Unified.to. Instead of letting integrations become a bottleneck in their sales pipeline, they could confidently engage with potential customers regardless of their tech stack. More importantly, they could offload the entire integration burden — from initial development to ongoing maintenance — onto a reliable partner.
"With Unified.to, we can make promises to customers about integration support and know we can deliver. Instead of having to stop everything to build integrations, we can focus on closing deals and growing our business."
Bijan Vaez, Co-founder
This partnership proved especially valuable when it came to managing integration complexity. For a small team, building and maintaining expertise across multiple platforms creates an ongoing operational burden. Each new integration not only meant specialized knowledge to acquire and maintain, but also additional technical complexity to document and train for — all of which pulled focus from core product development.
By partnering with Unified.to, Merchkit achieved several critical advantages:
- Maintained sales momentum without technical interruptions
- Kept their engineering team focused on core AI technology
- Eliminated the risk of losing in-house integration expertise
- Ensured consistent integration quality across platforms
Most importantly, they could pursue new sales opportunities without worrying about technical implementation details slowing them down.
A refreshingly simple approach to complex integrations
In an industry notorious for overpromising and underdelivering, Unified.to's straightforward approach caught Merchkit's attention. Here was a platform that matched its marketing with its capabilities — simple to use, yet powerful enough for enterprise needs. This commitment to transparency extended through every aspect of the platform, from its unified data models to its intuitive developer experience.
"The clear and open Unified data models were spot-on. Having a system that's opinionated but flexible, that you can map your schema against, makes the integration process so much smoother."
Bijan Vaez, Co-founder
The power of this approach became clear with their first Shopify customer. This customer had been using NetSuite's built-in connector to sync their product catalog — a process that took five business days to complete. Using Unified.to, Merchkit synced the same 130,000-product catalog in just 80 minutes. "When we ran that sync, the customer's jaws were on the floor," recalls Bijan. "They had built their entire business around that 5-day sync process." This dramatic improvement didn't just transform one customer's operations — it helped Merchkit demonstrate clear market traction to investors, making Unified.to an unexpected ally in their fundraising journey.
This early success set the stage for future rapid expansion. As Merchkit added support for more platforms like Akeneo, they appreciated that Unified.to's excellence extended beyond just the technical platform:
- Clear, comprehensive documentation
- Responsive customer support
- Straightforward onboarding process
- Broad platform coverage with deep capabilities
The Unified.to advantage
Merchkit's experience demonstrates how the right integration strategy can transform both technical capabilities and business growth:
- Confidence in every sales conversation: Ability to pursue any customer opportunity, knowing integration requirements won't become a bottleneck
- Dramatic performance improvements: Turning multi-day processes into hour-long operations, delighting customers and impressing investors
- Engineering focus preserved: Core team maintaining momentum on AI innovation rather than integration upkeep
- Enterprise-ready from day one: Unified data models and reliable performance meeting the needs of large-scale customers
By choosing Unified.to, Merchkit transformed what could have been their biggest technical hurdle into a strategic advantage. Today, they confidently pursue customers of any size, knowing they can deliver the enterprise-grade performance these customers expect.
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