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Tulip is a tablet app for store staff that surfaces customer purchase history in real time – enabling personalized selling at every interaction and claiming 10–20% revenue lifts for adopters.
ENTRY ANGLES
Deploy sales enablement platform at pickup/fulfillment points to enable guided selling and upselling · Extend sales associate tools beyond retail floor to remote/distributed customer interaction points (service technicians, chat-based personal shoppers) · Equip pickup location staff with purchase history, browsing data, and inventory visibility to convert visits into secondary sales
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Customer purchase history and browsing data integration, Real-time inventory visibility across broader catalog, Sales recommendation engine
Tulip is a tablet and smartphone application for store associates – the frontline staff who work retail floors and interact directly with customers.
The promise is straightforward: better tools for sales staff produce higher average transaction values and better return rates. Tulip cites internal figures of 10–20% revenue improvements for stores using the platform. The mechanism is relationship memory. A good sales associate learns customer preferences over time and uses that knowledge to recommend the right product at the right moment. Tulip provides that same capability to any associate, even when meeting a customer for the first time: contact details, purchase history, noted preferences, and any prior interactions with colleagues are all available instantly.
The application also reduces the distance between decision and purchase. Rather than letting a customer walk to a register and risk a change of heart in the queue, the associate can close the sale on the floor, on the spot. A unified cart shared between the app and the online store extends this further – associates can see what a customer has left in their online cart and attempt to convert those items during the in-store visit, either directly or with comparable alternatives.
An integrated chat function connects associates with customers via mainstream messaging apps. Associates can initiate contact proactively – sending photos and links about new arrivals to past customers – and customers can reach their preferred associate directly with questions. Inventory visibility is built in: without leaving the conversation, an associate can check real-time stock across sizes, colors, and styles and request floor delivery from the stockroom.
Using the same software infrastructure, Tulip has also built a separate solution for online grocery – connecting a customer-facing storefront with warehouse staff to synchronize inventory status and streamline order picking and dispatch.
Tulip raised $28M on June 28th; Salesfloor raised $27M two weeks earlier in mid-June, bringing its total to $30M against Tulip's near $80M. Two closely competing products, two similar raise sizes, timed within weeks of each other.
The proximity is worth pausing on. Physical retail has proven more resilient than many observers expected. E-commerce's share of US retail stood around 16% before the pandemic period, spiked to roughly 32% during it, and has stabilized well below that peak. Offline remains the larger channel. That durability has apparently convinced a new wave of investors that the right question isn't online versus offline – it's how to combine both for maximum effect.
The O2O (Online to Offline) concept surfaced years ago – stores in some markets began functioning as offline showrooms for online brands, where visitors could inspect physical samples before placing digital orders for home delivery. The idea had its moment and faded. What's returning now is a more grounded version: not a redesign of retail around a new concept, but a practical upgrade to how existing retail staff do their jobs, using software that connects online and offline customer data in real time.
The clearest proof that this works is in the 10–20% revenue lift Tulip reports. That range is not transformational on its own, but it's consistent, it's measurable, and it compounds across a full store portfolio. For a large retailer running hundreds of locations, a 10% same-store revenue improvement is a very large number.
The model at pickup and fulfillment points is underdeveloped. Consider the last-mile pickup location – a standalone spot where customers collect online orders, try items on, and return what doesn't fit. Currently, staff at these locations process transactions and handle logistics. They have no tools for guided selling, no access to the customer's purchase history beyond the current order, and no capability to surface relevant inventory from a broader catalog.
A Tulip-equivalent deployed at pickup locations changes that dynamic. The associate now sees purchase history, can flag items a customer browsed but didn't buy, knows what related inventory is available, and can close a secondary sale without the customer needing to visit a traditional store. The customer is already present, already in a buying context, and already engaged with the brand. The marginal cost of converting that visit into a larger transaction is low.
More broadly, platforms like Tulip can extend the sales associate function beyond the traditional retail floor context. Anyone who interacts directly with a potential buyer – a pickup location employee, a service technician, a personal shopper operating remotely over chat – can in principle have access to the same combination of purchase history, live inventory, and recommendation tooling that Tulip gives floor staff. The platform doesn't have to stay on the shop floor. The combination of online reach and offline conversion – each covering the weakness of the other – is where the real upside sits.