The founder of LeelaRam Technologies spent years inside a working e-commerce business before writing a line of the product. Here is how that shaped SellRank, and the way the company builds software.
Most software for merchants is written by people who have never had to merchandise anything. Sumit Chavda came at it from the other direction: he was running e-commerce technology for a live jewellery brand, watching real collections earn or lose real money every day, long before LeelaRam Technologies existed as a company.
The problem found him first
The first version of what became SellRank was not a product idea. It was a fix. A store with a large catalogue had collection pages ordered by whatever Shopify's defaults produced, and the first row — the only row most phone visitors ever see — was routinely wrong. Out-of-stock pieces at the top. Products that sold well two seasons ago outranking the ones selling this week. Nobody had time to drag hundreds of products by hand every morning.
So he built an engine: percentage slots, weighted scoring across real sales signals, and a server-side write path into Shopify's own manual sort. It ran on lucirajewelry.com's live collections, with real orders behind every ranking decision — the only test bench that actually settles an argument about merchandising.
What working inside a business teaches you
Three habits from those years show up in everything LeelaRam Technologies ships:
- Merchandising is a composition, not a sort. A real merchandiser thinks in slices — proven sellers first, fresh arrivals next, then the rest — which is why SellRank's editor is built around percentage slots rather than a single dropdown.
- Software that touches revenue has to be provable. An ordering bug on a live store is silent; nobody files a ticket for the orders that quietly did not happen. That is why every product carries an automated verification suite and a live-store audit.
- A human has to be able to overrule the machine. Data does not know about Monday's campaign. Pins, demotions and drag-and-drop survive every automatic refresh.
Beyond one store
Through the company, Sumit has also led the end-to-end redevelopment of PrimeStyle, a US diamond-jewellery brand on Shopify — storefront architecture, product-management workflows across a large variant-heavy catalogue, analytics, integrations and a release process safe enough to ship often on a production store. And he built the Chamunda Constructions site from nothing, for a contractor with a twenty-year track record and no online presence to show for it.
Different industries, same pattern: get inside the business, find the problem the owner actually has, build the smallest complete thing that solves it, and prove it moved a number.
Why a company, and why now
LeelaRam Technologies was founded in 2026 in Mumbai around a simple observation: the hard-won software built inside one business is usually the software a hundred other businesses need, and almost none of it ever escapes. SellRank is the first attempt to let it escape — the engine rebuilt as a multi-tenant Shopify app with a first-party engagement pixel, so it never depends on a merchant's analytics setup.
The company's four words — growth, consistency, relationship, trust — are the founder's working method written down. Growth means building for a metric the client names. Consistency means the same standard on release fifty as on release one, checked by a machine. Relationship means a real person answers, and keeps answering. Trust means estimates are labelled as estimates and pricing has no surprise meters.
On the Max plan of SellRank, 'direct line to the founder for merchandising advice' is a listed feature. That is not a growth hack. It is the part of the job he was doing before there was a product.
