Sweden's Tictail gets Europe's small business owners set up online

Tictail wants to be the way European small businesses build their stores online. It received $1.5 million today, though the company may have stiff competition.

The round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Klaus Hommel.

Stockholm-based Tictail allows small businesses to set up a website as well as manage the back-end work such as inventory and shipments. Indeed, along with the funding, Tictail is also releasing a new “to-do” product that lets business owners keep track of, you guessed it, to-dos like shipments and the need for new inventory. It also provides analysis on your store’s performance, order notifications, ability to tweet and share items and news with Facebook from your store, and email customers from your dashboard.

The company will soon release a “discount code” product to allow stores to support loyalty programs.

Setting up a site on Tictail seems fairly intuitive. You can choose a front-end theme to display your merchandise, set up PayPal in order to receive payments, and add your inventory. It comes with a built-in shopping cart and secure check-out process, and will help you with the language for things like your return policy.

Tictail is solely focused on the European market. It currently serves the Nordics, Germany, as well as the U.K. With this funding, Tictail will focus specifically on growth in the U.K. and has “bigger growth targets also set for Europe.”

An obvious competitor to Tictail is Etsy, in the sense that it sets smalls businesses up to sell their products online. It also provides them with a number of tools to reach their customers, and in Etsy’s case, makes it very easy to set up payments and has a fairly slick way of showing off the products. Tictail, on the other hand, helps businesses be a little more independent, running their own sites.

The company was founded in May 2012 and says it hosts over 5,000 stores. Its advisory board includes Spotify chief product officer Gustav Soderstrom, and Tumblr chief operating officer Fredrik Nylander.