Huntsville-based CommentSold, the leading digital commerce solution that enables retail businesses to unlock sales growth through live and social selling, announced this week that it has acquired Social Retail Success (SRS).

According to Brandon Kruse, Founder and CEO of CommentSold, this acquisition will provide the company’s partners with advanced analytics that will help accelerate their success.

SRS offers an advanced business analytics suite that allows retailers on the CommentSold platform to optimize sales, plan and manage inventory, and manage customer relationships to increase profitability. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The SRS analytics suite helps businesses identify opportunities to reach and convert new customers and increase their sales and profitability. The suite provides merchants with business intelligence including sales, inventory, cost-savings, and consumer activity analyses and trend reports. SRS will also soon add a customer lifetime value analysis to its range of reports.

CommentSold has also announced that SRS founder Tim Gallagher has joined the company as Director of Retail Strategy.

“SRS’s analytics suite is a strong complement to the other capabilities we offer retailers and we couldn’t be more pleased to welcome SRS founder Tim Gallagher to our team to lead our retail strategy efforts. He founded and architected SRS specifically for merchants on our platform and he’s an expert at using data and technology solutions to help independent retailers track performance and execute winning growth strategies,” Kruse said.

Kruse, a Huntsville native, is no stranger to entrepreneurship: he jumped into tech at an early age, starting in technology and telecom while looking for servers for a website. As a 15-year-old he began working at Digium and left the company two years later to start his own full-time startup, Dialmaxx, after seeing a need for a higher level of integration and support for smaller telecom companies.

By his early twenties Kruse had sold his company, using some of the proceeds to purchase a surplus Huntsville school building for $500,000 and to transform it into Huntsville West, a business incubator and coworking space located at 3001 9th Avenue SW near Lowe Mill. CommentSold came soon after, founded by Kruse in 2017.

Gallagher’s experience in developing and operationalizing new capabilities and for collaborating with business leaders will add further value to the company. As Director of Retail Strategy, Gallagher’s role is to develop strategic guidance, technology tools, and coaching programs that will maximize the sales, profitability, and efficiency of CommentSold enterprise clients.

CommentSold enables live and local selling for online retailers across social media networks, merchants’ websites, and branded mobile apps that are powered by CommentSold. A unique feature offered by the company is the ability for customers to cart and purchase items by simply commenting “sold” on live video sales or posts.

The platform also helps retailers automate invoicing, payments, communications, inventory management, order fulfillment, marketing, and other business functions so companies can focus on growth and customer relationships.

CommentSold currently powers e-commerce operations, including live and social selling, for over 7,000 companies. Kruse said that although the company does not have any expansion plans at the moment relating to this acquisition, “our goal is to continue the growth of CommentSold to be the largest live social commerce platform, persistently helping our retailers not only grow but win.”

“Huntsville has been a great place to do business, as it’s teeming with diverse talent while offering the benefit of a low cost of living.” he continued.