I’ve been reading about the less visible side of UK e-commerce lately. When most of us think about online retail, we picture the shop front: the products, the checkout, the delivery van. But a lot of small UK startups are working on the parts nobody sees, such as writing product listings, taking product photos, building a mobile app, or spotting that a store has quietly broken something. It’s a different way to look at the sector, because the value isn’t in a new product but in the dull jobs that take up a seller’s week. I’m no expert on e-commerce, so I’d welcome corrections if I’ve misread any of this.
A few that stuck with me:
I came across Aistetic, which turns product photos into ready-to-publish listings for resale marketplaces. As far as I can tell from their site, it generates the title, description and price, then publishes to places like eBay, Vinted and Depop. They claim it cuts listing time by about half, which is their own figure, but anyone who has listed a pile of items by hand will recognise the problem. It also mentions being backed by research from the University of Oxford.
There’s also EcomStation ai, a London-based AI image tool for product photography. What interested me is the idea of keeping the product itself unchanged while the background and scene change around it. They compare roughly £15 for 100 images against around £8,000 for a traditional photoshoot, which is a bold comparison, so I’d treat it as a marketing claim and not a benchmark. Even so, product photography is clearly one of the more expensive parts of selling online.
On the app side, Venn Apps builds native iOS and Android apps for Shopify brands. It positions itself against template-based app builders, with a dedicated designer, real-time sync with the store and a fixed monthly fee. I hadn’t thought much about how many fashion and beauty brands now treat a mobile app as a separate sales channel.
Vortex IQ is a different kind of tool. It describes itself as an AI workforce that finds problems in an online store, proposes a fix and waits for a person to approve it before changing anything. I liked that the approval step is built in as the default. It was also listed at number 20 in the Business Cloud Retail Tech 50 for 2025, according to its own press page.
And Bakkali is a bit different from the rest. It’s an online Middle Eastern supermarket with over 3,000 products, halal meat and delivery across England, Scotland and Wales, with free delivery over £40. It isn’t a tool for sellers but a seller itself, and it shows how much room there still is for retailers built around communities that mainstream supermarkets only partly serve.
What struck me across all five is how much of modern e-commerce seems to sit in the layers between “having a product” and “selling it”: the listing, the picture, the app, the monitoring. It also made me realise how many hours small sellers probably lose to jobs that don’t feel like running a business. At the same time, I’m wary of how many of these claims come from the companies themselves, and I’d like to see how they hold up for ordinary small sellers instead of the showcase examples.
I’m curious how this looks in practice. If you sell online, which part of the process takes up the most of your time, listing, photography, customer support or something else? And has anyone tried tools like these and found that the saving was real, or did it just move the work somewhere else?
A few that stuck with me:
I came across Aistetic, which turns product photos into ready-to-publish listings for resale marketplaces. As far as I can tell from their site, it generates the title, description and price, then publishes to places like eBay, Vinted and Depop. They claim it cuts listing time by about half, which is their own figure, but anyone who has listed a pile of items by hand will recognise the problem. It also mentions being backed by research from the University of Oxford.
There’s also EcomStation ai, a London-based AI image tool for product photography. What interested me is the idea of keeping the product itself unchanged while the background and scene change around it. They compare roughly £15 for 100 images against around £8,000 for a traditional photoshoot, which is a bold comparison, so I’d treat it as a marketing claim and not a benchmark. Even so, product photography is clearly one of the more expensive parts of selling online.
On the app side, Venn Apps builds native iOS and Android apps for Shopify brands. It positions itself against template-based app builders, with a dedicated designer, real-time sync with the store and a fixed monthly fee. I hadn’t thought much about how many fashion and beauty brands now treat a mobile app as a separate sales channel.
Vortex IQ is a different kind of tool. It describes itself as an AI workforce that finds problems in an online store, proposes a fix and waits for a person to approve it before changing anything. I liked that the approval step is built in as the default. It was also listed at number 20 in the Business Cloud Retail Tech 50 for 2025, according to its own press page.
And Bakkali is a bit different from the rest. It’s an online Middle Eastern supermarket with over 3,000 products, halal meat and delivery across England, Scotland and Wales, with free delivery over £40. It isn’t a tool for sellers but a seller itself, and it shows how much room there still is for retailers built around communities that mainstream supermarkets only partly serve.
What struck me across all five is how much of modern e-commerce seems to sit in the layers between “having a product” and “selling it”: the listing, the picture, the app, the monitoring. It also made me realise how many hours small sellers probably lose to jobs that don’t feel like running a business. At the same time, I’m wary of how many of these claims come from the companies themselves, and I’d like to see how they hold up for ordinary small sellers instead of the showcase examples.
I’m curious how this looks in practice. If you sell online, which part of the process takes up the most of your time, listing, photography, customer support or something else? And has anyone tried tools like these and found that the saving was real, or did it just move the work somewhere else?