I knew the internet has changed the way many of us live and work, but who know that the kid that grew up playing computer games could now hawk themselves out as a Minecraft Gardener? Yes, it appears that not only is a Minecraft Gardener a job but it’s one in high demand paying north of £50 per hour.
A service, launched by Whatshed, was launched to help players of Minecraft, who dream of having the perfect in-game universe but are unsure how to design their outdoor havens. Available to players worldwide, the brand invited creative members of the public and Minecraft enthusiasts to apply to be a part of the collective of virtual gardeners. More than more than 20,000 applied from around the world in just three weeks, including one from a gamer aged six.
Gaming gardeners’ job role entails visiting clients’ virtual worlds to discuss desired styles and find practical solutions in real time. Consultants will also be expected to mock up a number of different design styles and suggested combinations, for players to refer back to at a later date should they feel the need for a redesign. 3,000 people have already registered their interest to hire a gardener!
Started as a solution for a frustrated landscape gardener struggling to find the best buy; WhatShed is now the largest independent guide for gardening and garden buildings in the UK. Offering advice on a range of topics including purchasing garden buildings, how to spot a shed from a cabin and how to preserve your plants, Whatshed is a one stop shop for any gardener, novice and experts alike!
“When we launched this service we knew that there would be some demand for it, however nothing could have prepared us for this! We’ve been seeing thousands of applicants a day from every corner of the globe; America, Australia, India – we’ve got an applicant in almost every country in the world it seems.
If you haven’t applied yet there is still time and to everyone that’s already applied: please bear with us! It’s going to take some time to get through all the applications once the closing date has passed. While we will only be able to reply to successful candidates we’re thrilled to have captured the attention of so many gaming and gardening fans; thank you to everyone that has shown interest in this so far.” – Kate Fromings, Whatshed
Register here to become a Minecraft Gardener
Register here to hire a Minecraft Gardener
We’re fast approaching a second lock down Easter and this time, although most of the shops in the country are closed, at least we’ve got some experience of what to expect. How will you be handling the four day weekend and catching up on shipping on Tuesday and will you be taking advantage of the modest relaxations to visit family and friends?
Easter, like Christmas, is always a challenge as with no courier collections for many sellers on Friday or Monday, there’s a massive backlog of parcels to get out of the door by Tuesday. This presents two main problems – the sheer volume of picking and packing to undertake and the inevitable worry as to whether there will be room on the courier or postal service van to actually collect the parcels.
This year, with some minor relaxations coming into effect in most UK countries just in time for lock down Easter, like many others you’ll probably want to see family and friends and for Easter will be the first weekend you’re legally allowed to. In England, you can meet in socially distanced groups of six in outdoor spaces including private gardens, or two families can meet even if that results in a larger gathering. The important point is the ‘socially distanced’ bit, so if you’re about to fire up the barbie and have a meal together then bear in mind the intention isn’t to all sit around the patio table – you should remain 2m apart.
Many will want to take a break and have some time off, but there will be the inevitable Spring rush of jobs that are discovered and with most shops closed consumers are likely to be getting clicky on their smartphones as they order everything from paint to garden furniture. Prices are likely to remain on the high side as stock shortages are inevitable – with the promise that just about all restrictions on our lifestyles might be relaxed by June, there is still no realistic prospect of overseas holidays any time soon so domestic holidaying or simply staying at home will be this year’s plan for many.
A four day break with some lock down Easter relaxations sounds amazing and we’re hoping you have a fantastic break. But before Thursday comes and you knock off work, make sure you’re prepared and the warehouse is ready for the manic Tuesday that will follow.
In 2019, my colleague Matt Harris coined the term “embedded fintech” to describe how virtually all software-driven companies will soon embed financial services into their applications, from sending and receiving payments to enabling lending, insurance and banking services, an idea that quickly spread within the fintech community.
Vertical apps such as Toast for restaurants, Squire for barbershops and Shopmonkey for car repair shops will deliver financial services to businesses in the future rather than traditional, stodgy financial institutions.
Embedded procurement is the natural evolution of embedded fintech.
The embedded fintech movement has just begun, but there is already a sister concept percolating: embedded procurement. In this next wave, businesses will buy things they need through vertical B2B apps, rather than through sales reps, distributors or an individual merchant’s website.
If you own a coffee shop, wouldn’t it be convenient to schedule recurring orders for beans and milk from the same software portal where you process payments, manage accounting and handle payroll? The companies that figured out how to monetize financial services via embedded fintech are well positioned to monetize through procurement, too.
Embedded procurement is the natural evolution of embedded fintech. The salon software company Fresha is a typical embedded fintech story. Fresha’s platform is an online and mobile platform specially designed for spas and salons, encompassing appointment scheduling, reporting and analytics, marketing promotions, and point-of-sale capabilities. The software is free for salons; Fresha monetizes through payment processing.
In the future, Fresha will undoubtedly turn to embedded procurement, becoming a logical place for business owners to order and manage inventory like shampoo, scissors, brushes and other supplies. In turn, Fresha can aggregate demand from thousands of spas to place orders with its suppliers, leveraging its scale to negotiate more favorable pricing on behalf of its customers. Borrowing a concept from the healthcare world, vertical software companies will become group purchasing organizations in every sector.
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Update: It seems that the market is volatile indeed. After pricing its shares at the lower end of the range, Deliveroo, trading as “ROO” on the London Stock Exchange, opened at 331 pence (£3.31), down some 15% on its private placement pricing, and it has been continuing to decline throughout the day. It finally closed at 287.45 pence — down 43.55% on its opening price of 331 pence after trading in a range between 271 pence and 344.95 pence has fallen short of the debut price, too. Some are claiming that the poor debut is due in part to public pressure over its labor practices, which we detail below. We’ll continue to update this story with pricing. Original post below.
Tech stocks continue to deliver on the public markets, figuratively and literally: Deliveroo, the UK food-delivery giant backed by Amazon that has seen a surge of business during the Covid-19 pandemic, has announced pricing of £3.90 ($5.36) for its shares when goes public on the London Stock Exchange later today, valuing it with a market cap of £7.59 billion ($10.4 billion), and raising £1.50 billion ($2.1 billion).
The figure is at the lower end of the reduced range Deliveroo set earlier in the week of £3.90-£4.10. At the time, Deliveroo said the “volatile global market conditions for IPOs” led it to narrow the range from its original £3.90-£4.60. “Deliveroo is choosing to price responsibly within the initial range and at an entry point that maximises long-term value for our new institutional and retail investors,” the company said.
However, separately, Deliveroo has been facing persistent controversy over how it pays its drivers, a story that doesn’t look like it will go away too soon. Deliveroo sources have repeatedly claimed that negative stories arising out of these labor issues have not been impacting the company in the lead-up to the IPO, although some have been detailing the large institutional investors that have refused to participate in the offering. Activity today on the market could be one indication of what the real impact has been.
The listing today is a milestone not just for the company but for the London stock market in general. At a time when a number of scaled up privately-held tech companies have, and are exercising, a lot of options — acquisitions to bigger rivals, listing in the U.S. market, pursuing a SPAC — it’s notable that Deliveroo has opted for the LSE. It’s the biggest IPO on the exchange in terms of market cap in nine years (when commodity giant Glencore listed in 2011), and the biggest in terms of money raised since last September (when e-commerce company The Hut Group listed).
“I am very proud that Deliveroo is going public in London – our home,” said Will Shu, Deliveroo’s CEO and co-founder. “As we reach this milestone I want to thank everyone who has helped to build Deliveroo into the company it is today — in particular our restaurants and grocers, riders and customers. In this next phase of our journey as a public company we will continue to invest in the innovations that help restaurants and grocers to grow their businesses, to bring customers more choice than ever before, and to provide riders with more work. Our aim is to build the definitive online food company and we’re very excited about the future ahead.” As with the U.S. exchanges, tech companies are fueling a lot of the action on the LSE at the moment, with four out of the last five IPOs valued at over £1.5 billion in the last five years coming from tech companies.
Regardless of how Deliveroo fares today, the labor controversy facing the company in its main market is one that will continue to play out. A report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the UK found that one in three Deliveroo couriers made less than £8.72, which is the UK national minimum wage for those over 25. In some cases, the disparity of earnings was especially stark: a cyclist in Yorkshire worked 180 hours and was paid the equivalent of £2 per hour, it found. Deliveroohas typically said that its couriers are paid more than £10 an hour on average.
One reason that the story might continue to persist is because it’s about more than just Deliveroo. Earlier this month, Uber reclassified 70,000 drivers in the UK as workers to give them benefits as the result of losing a court case, although Uber Eats — a rival to Deliveroo — was not included in the deal. However, it may not be legal but public pressure that will shift what happens with food delivery drivers. Just Eat, another competitor in the space, last year kicked off an agency worker model that gives drivers the option to work instead under an hourly wage rather than per ride. That becomes, in turn, one possible outcome for how to resolve the situation.
Whether or not investors have an opinion on this matter, it may not be that the so-called “investors revolt” is directly related to a sense of justice for low-paid delivery people, as it is the threat of legal action, losing court cases, and generally finding more costs on the bottom line than originally anticipated in the company’s unit economics.
Those unit economics are indeed a focus for investors, who may be bullish on the basic idea even as disputes over how to run it as an equitable business continue. Going into the IPO, Deliveroo is not profitable, but its loss had been narrowing on a huge surge of sales during the Covid-19 pandemic, not least because many restaurants have been forced to shut down their dine-in businesses and so consumers are turning to services like this to get their fixes of pre-prepared sushi, pizza, jerk chicken and burritos.
Tom Powdrill, head of stewardship at Pensions & Investment Research Consultants, an independent body providing services to pension fund investors, has been one of the more outspoken on how labor practices might play out for investors. In a blog post published today, he points out that issues such as the company’s dual-class structure, which gives less influence to asset managers, has played a part, but so has this ongoing labor issue:
“Reasons for ducking the Deliveroo IPO are varied,” he writes. “Partly it’s a simple question of how successful the business is likely to be. It’s also being shunned due to its treatment of riders who are generally employed on a gig-basis leaving them unentitled to basic benefits. This has two aspects to it. On the one hand some investors may find the employment model too much on its own terms. But it’s also a risk. If Deliveroo is successfully legally challenged on employment status the economics change too, as we saw recently with Uber.”
Post updated with trading price.
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After a lackluster IPO pricing run, shares of Deliveroo are lower today, marking a disappointing debut for the hot delivery company.
A good question to ask at this juncture is why Deliveroo struggled with its IPO during a historically strong moment for tech flotations. The European unicorn listed on the London Stock Exchange, however, possibly placing its public offering in a different climate than recent IPO successes listed in the United States.
TechCrunch noted on Monday that there were local concerns regarding Deliveroo’s governance and treatment of workers. At the time, however, those worries merely led to a decrease in the company’s IPO valuation.
Why did Deliveroo struggle when it began to trade? Is it suffering from cultural dissonance between its high-growth model and more conservative European investors? Let’s peek at the numbers and find out.
Deliveroo versus DoorDash
To ground us, let’s explore how differently the public markets value Deliveroo and DoorDash. If they are valued somewhat closely, we’ll be able to dismiss the question of whether the British delivery giant is really being treated with more skepticism than its American comp.
Not that we care, really, one way or the other about any single company’s value. But we do care if listing on a European exchange — I refuse to acknowledge Brexit this morning — means that companies valuing growth over profits are going to generate more stick than praise when they list.
So, briefly, here’s the data we need to make our comparison. We’ll start with DoorDash:
A study from wholesale goods supplier, Wholesale Clearance, reveals Newcastle residents are most likely to seek out income through a second job, compared with other UK cities.
Upon seeing an increase in personal buyers picking up wholesale stock to sell on the side, Wholesale Clearance analysed Google search data to find out which cities are getting into the entrepreneurial spirit – and which second jobs are proving most popular.
The research reveals those living in Newcastle were most keen on starting a side hustle, scoring a total of 87.97 out of 100. This includes registering the most interest in ‘becoming an influencer’ and ‘trading stocks’.
Top 10 Cities Most-Interested in Second Jobs
Rank
City
Score (/100)
1
Newcastle upon Tyne
87.97
2
Reading
87.75
3
Brighton
80.65
4
Portsmouth
79.29
5
Nottingham
76.08
6
Plymouth
73.88
7
Derby
70.47
8
Northampton
69.74
9
Coventry
64.45
10
Manchester
63.65
The desire to pursue a second income as an influencer in Newcastle comes as no surprise, with influencers from the city reportedly pulling in lucrative fees for their Instagram posts. Recently, Geordie Shore stars were reported to rake-in up to £6,508 per post.
Another possible explanation for the demand for side hustles in Newcastle may be the unequal impact of the pandemic on businesses in the North East. Research suggests almost two-thirds of businesses in the region have reported falling revenue since COVID-19 – more than any other UK region.
Reading (87.75), Brighton (80.65), Portsmouth (79.29) and Nottingham (76.08) complete the top 5 cities searching for side hustle success. Reading even topped the table for searches including ‘selling second-hand items’, ‘babysitting and housesitting’ and ‘Deliveroo jobs’.
Brighton unsurprisingly tops the table for searches related to ‘renting out parking’. Brighton pier was recently named the most popular tourist attraction outside of London – with the city’s residents subsequently looking to cash in on the footfall by renting out their driveway to day-trippers.
Across the UK, ‘selling second-hand items’ was the most common side hustle search, with ‘trading stocks’ and ‘handmade crafts’ featuring second and third respectively. This comes as second-hand sales on eBay reportedly increased 30% since the beginning of the pandemic. These sites are no longer seen as simply a convenient way of offloading unwanted items but a legitimate side-hustle business opportunity.
Bottom 10 Cities Most-Interested in Second Jobs
Rank
City
Score (/100)
16
Stoke-on-Trent
55.81
17
Leicester
53.10
18
Bradford
52.30
19
Kingston upon Hull
51.68
20
Liverpool
50.93
21
Glasgow
50.69
22
Sheffield
44.01
23
Birmingham
36.83
24
Cardiff
36.52
25
London
10.65
At the other end of the table, Londoners were revealed to be least likely to search for side hustle opportunities, reporting a normalised score of just 10.65 out of 100. This may be a result of Londoners being most likely to work from home during the pandemic. Those whose work has been the least affected by the pandemic may be less interested in starting up a side hustle.
Cardiff (36.52), Birmingham (36.83), Sheffield (44.01) and Glasgow (50.69) completed the bottom 5 second job cities. However, this may come as little surprise to their respective residents, with Cardiff, Birmingham and Sheffield all recently ranking among the UK’s ‘laziest cities’.
‘Renting out parking spaces’ was the least-searched side hustle in 2020 – which may be a result of the UK’s ‘stay at home’ warnings, which were in place for much of the year and discouraged movement around the country.
View the full findings on the Wholesale Clearance site here.
“It’s interesting to see how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the number of people looking for an extra income and the methods they’re researching.”
If you’re interested in taking on a side hustle, there are many ways to go about it. A simple Google search could spark some inspiration or help you to find a quick-win method. But it’s important to enjoy what you do, as this makes it easier to dedicate the time needed to make it successful.” – Karl Baxter, Managing Director, Wholesale Clearance
The new ecommerce VAT obligations for sellers and marketplaces in the UK & EU will impact your business, so if you missed this weeks’ essential webinar – 2021 UK & EU ecommerce VAT reforms – you can now watch again on TamebayTV or below.
What’s happening with UK & EU ecommerce VAT reforms?
On the 1st of January the UK’s HMRC’s new rules of VAT for ecommerce came into effect. The new UK ecommerce reforms puts new VAT calculation and collections obligations on UK and overseas sellers. It also makes online marketplaces responsible for the VAT on certain transactions by their sellers.
On the 1st of July 2021 the EU will also be introducing similar sweeping reforms to the VAT obligations of B2C ecommerce sellers and marketplaces.
In the webinar, we welcome Richard Asquith, Avalara VP Global Indirect Tax, who walks through:
Selling and shipping goods from outside the UK or EU to consumers
Listing your goods on major marketplaces in the UK or EU
Acting as a marketplace for sales to EU or UK buyers
This webinar provides an overview of the major reforms, and how it will affect sellers and marketplaces’ VAT, customs and tariff obligations, both in the UK and EU. You need to know what’s changing and what you need to do so click below to watch now:
Further Reading
The Marketplace Playbook is a report on how technology and digital-first strategies are creating the next generation of marketplace shopping. Written by Avalara and PSFK, you can download a copy here.
As well as key findings on ecommerce and digital-first consumers and what the shifting omnichannel landscape means for sellers, you’ll also learn how marketplaces function as part of a strategy for 2021 and beyond. There is a break down of the six strategies to help optimize the use of marketplaces and action plans for a next-generation marketplace experience
Avasam are here to help you expand your ecommerce business with robust, automated dropshipping. Want to test new product lines without a hefty commitment to stock? Short of stock due to supply chain issues and need to back fill to keep your virtual shelves full? Want to add in additional complimentary products to generate additional margin opportunities? Avasam can help with all of this and more.
We spoke to Tejas Dave, Avasam CEO, to find out more:
What is DropShipping?
DropShipping is a retail fulfilment method where the seller doesn’t hold or dispatch any stock. When a customer buys a product, the seller buys the item from a supplier and the supplier sends the item directly to the customer.
The seller doesn’t need to hold their own inventory or manage the shipping logistics while the supplier gains direct access to end customers without having to invest in marketing and multiple sales channels.
Download our ebook to learn more about DropShipping here.
Who are Avasam?
Avasam is the UK’s only multi-channel DropShipping marketplace, providing all the tools needed for online sellers to integrate their store, source products from UK-based verified suppliers, and automate their order processing, payments and shipping.
We built Avasam with the aim of removing the pain points traditionally associated with DropShipping, such as unreliable suppliers who are often based overseas; manual processes; the need for bespoke system integrations; lack of post-sale support; and a general lack of accountability.
Building the platform, the integrations and automating core processes was a big challenge in itself but designing the back-end governance and operational frameworks was just as complicated. Both are fundamental to our mission of making DropShipping simple, secure and reliable.
Tackling the many challenges of traditional DropShipping is far from easy and we are not perfect. But we are learning every day and are committed to supporting our supplier and seller partners at every stage of the exciting journey we are embarking on together.
Avasam is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom, and this is where most of our team are based. We also have offices in India, Czech Republic and Colombia.
I lead the Avasam team and have built my network in the industry across suppliers, sellers, marketplaces and service providers having previously founded eBusiness Guru, a tech solutions provider with 2,800+ customers and developed 700+ ecommerce websites and 400+ custom apps. I’m also also a member of the Forbes Business Council.
Our COO Peter has over 13 years investment banking experience in London and the Middle East and most recently spent 4 years as Head of Capital Markets, Funding & Investor Relations at one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, Mubadala Investment Company. Peter is heavily involved on the operations and finance side focused on building scalable processes to support our seller and supplier community.
Formerly part of the senior management team for Uber UK, Mustafa is our CRO and responsible for driving Avasam’s growth strategy and building the partner ecosystem. With 18 years experience in M&A and corporate strategy having previously worked at Virgin, Mars, IBM and Schroders.
What do you do?
We connect online retailers to our network of verified UK-based suppliers, who are brand owners, distributors and wholesalers.
Our retailers sell products on behalf of our suppliers across various online sales channels including webstores (Shopify, WooCommerce) and marketplaces (eBay, OnBuy and Amazon) without worrying about storage or delivery of the physical inventory.
We automate the core back-end processes such as order flow, payments and shipping instructions while also providing a comprehensive governance framework including strict performance SLAs for our suppliers, post-sale support and dispute resolution, so that online retailers can focus on scaling their business.
A summary video of what Avasam does is available at the bottom of our homepage here.
Why would I need additional inventory?
Sellers want to source additional inventory for a range of reasons including topping up stock, expanding your range, testing demand for new lines, attracting more traffic to existing listings, and launching on new sales platforms.
Our retailers have found that adding extra products to their inventory results in additional traffic to their website and listings, bigger basket sizes and additional orders. Being able to direct orders to suppliers means that there are fewer chances that listings show as out of stock.
Listing additional inventory from DropShipping suppliers is a convenient way to sell more, without additional manual work on the retailer’s behalf – they simply pass the order to the supplier for fulfilment.
Selling additional lines from suppliers using the DropShipping model allows retailers to test demand for products before investing in stock, and to launch on sales channels that they have not previously sold through.
Which platforms do you integrate with?
Avasam is integrated with a number of leading marketplaces and ecommerce webstore platforms listed here and as follows:
Webstores
Shopify
WooCommerce
Big Commerce (coming soon)
Marketplaces
OnBuy
eBay
Amazon
Wish (coming soon)
Social media
Facebook Shops (coming soon)
Order Management systems
Linnworks
We also support placing manual orders and importing orders using import files, for which more information is available here.
I’ve heard of drop shipping, how can I trust delivery?
Since our suppliers are UK-based and have been verified by us, we’ve taken the hard work out of the due diligence that you’d normally need to do when working with a new supplier. In addition, we require our suppliers to abide by strict SLAs, so that orders are dispatched on time and for us this means within 24 hours on business days.
You’ll be able to see when your supplier has dispatched an order, and dispatch notifications are sent directly to the end customers.
Suppliers are also expected to respond to customer queries within 24 hours on business days and respond to post-sale support matters such as return requests in a timely manner.
If for any reason the supplier is not meeting the required service standards, our customer support team is available 6 days a week to step in and assist.
What happens when products go out of stock?
We synchronise inventory levels every 30 minutes across your integrated sales channels. If a product goes out of stock (and your products listings are mapped correctly) we will update your listings and mark them as being out of stock to avoid overselling.
We cannot guarantee that items will not go out of stock as our suppliers operate different models. Some offer a narrow range of products that they restock regularly while others focus on a wide range that may not be restocked.
How does payment work?
Orders must be paid before they will be dispatched by your suppliers. We do not provide for manual payments on a per order basis as this is not efficient when automating a large volume of orders.
Sellers are required to register a payment card (Visa, Mastercard or American Express) before they start selling in order to ensure their orders flow seamlessly to suppliers.
How do I get started?
It’s super easy to set up an account and integrate your sales channel. All you have to decide then is which products you would like to source and list from our extensive catalogue of verified products and start selling.
We offer a free account for processing up to 10 orders a month. This is not time-bound, and you will have access to our full product catalogue and functionality.
Once you exceed 10 orders a month you will need to move to a paid account. We’ve made this affordable, as set out here, so that your business can scale and continue to sell.
Our support team are available 6-days a week to support you and help you get started. In addition we have a comprehensive suite of help videos available here or you can view our searchable help articles available here.
Otrium has raised a $120 million round just a year after raising its $26 million Series B round. BOND and returning investor Index Ventures are leading the round. Existing investor Eight Roads Ventures is also participating.
The concept behind Otrium is quite simple. When items reach the end-of-season status, brands can list those items on Otrium and keep selling them. Otrium is currently available in Europe. Right now, many brands have their own end-of-season sales. But there are some limits to this model.
Those companies often can’t sell their entire back inventory this way. Moreover, the most luxurious fashion brands don’t necessarily want to put a cheaper price tag on their items in their own stores. That’s why a lot of clothing produced stays unsold — and by unsold, it means that those items often get destroyed.
With Otrium, brands can add another sales channel for those specific items. And selling those items online makes a ton of sense as you don’t want to manage small end-of-season inventories across multiple stores. One big online inventory is all you need.
And because some brands are reluctant about selling outdated items, Otrium tries to be as friendly as possible with fashion companies. They retain control over pricing, merchandising and visibility of their excess inventory.
The startup also recently launched advanced analytics. The idea here is that Otrium can help brands identify evergreen products that should remain available year after year.
“We believe that the fashion world will see a rebalancing in the next few years, with more sales being driven by iconic items that brands sell year after year, and will be less reliant on new seasonal launches,” co-founder and CEO Milan Daniels said in a statement.
And it would be a win-win for everyone involved. Otrium would end up selling items that remain relevant for a longer time. And fashion brands could slowly build an evergreen collection of items that would nicely complement their fast fashion collections.
With today’s funding round, Otrium plans to expand to the U.S. The company currently works with several well-known fashion houses, such as Karl Lagerfeld, Joseph, Anine Bing, Belstaff, Reiss and ASICS.
Amazon has acquired a startup in India that is helping offline stores go online, the e-commerce group’s latest attempt to make inroads in the world’s second most populous nation where brick and mortar continue to drive more than 95% of sales.
The American e-commerce group said on Tuesday evening that it has acquired Perpule, a four-year-old startup. A regulatory filing showed Amazon Technologies paid $14.7 million to acquire the Indian startup in an all-cash deal. The company is expected to spend an additional $5 million or so to compensate Perpule’s employees.
Perpule, which had raised $6.36 million (per insight platform Tracxn), offers a mobile payments device (point of sale machine) to offline retailers to help them accept digital payments and also establish presence on various mini app stores including those run by Paytm, PhonePe, and Google Pay in India.
“Perpule has built an innovative cloud-based POS offering that enables offline stores in India to better manage their inventory, checkout process, and overall customer experience,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
“We are excited to have the Perpule team join us to focus on providing growth opportunities for businesses of all sizes in India while raising the bar of the shopping experience for Indian customers.”
Founded in late 2016, the Indian startup’s first product was focused on helping customers avoid queues at super chains such as Shoppers Stop, Spar Hypermarket, Big Bazaar, and More. But the product, said Abhinav Pathak in a recent interview, wasn’t scaling, which is when Perpule pivoted.
The Bangalore-based startup — which counts Prime Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital, and Raghunandan G (founder of neobank Zolve) among its investors — has further expanded in recent years, launching products like StoreSE, which enables a business to support group ordering.
Last year, it also expanded geographically; bringing its offerings to Southeast Asian markets including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam.
The company’s push into physical retail comes as Flipkart, and Reliance Jio Platforms (backed by Facebook and Google), which last year raised over $20 billion, also race to capture this market. The acquisition of Perpule comes less than a week after Google backed DotPe, a startup that offers several similar products.
These neighborhood stores offer all kinds of items, are family-run and pay low wages and little to no rent. Because they are ubiquitous — there are more than 30 million neighborhood stores in India, according to industry estimates — no retail giant can offer a faster delivery. And on top of that, their economics are often better than most of their digital counterparts.
Online shopping is on the rise and will remain this way post-COVID as shoppers continue to buy on marketplaces and retailer websites to satisfy demand. In fact, the Office of National Statistics have revised their forecasts from 20% to a forecast of 30% year-on-year growth as online sales rocket thanks to the Pandemic and the permanent change it has had on shopping habits. But as the size of the ecommerce pie (and competition) gets bigger, so too do the demands and expectations of the online shopper. Yet, the latest consumer research tells us that retailers still have a long way to go to close the gap between what consumers expect from delivery and returns – and, what they actually experience.
With one in two consumers saying they have abandoned a purchase at checkout because they didn’t find a delivery option to suit them and more than 59% saying they would not buy from a retailer again after a bad returns experience, it’s vital that retailers close the gap on the delivery and returns experience or get left behind. The problem gets bigger as customers expect the experience to be consistent, regardless of whether they are buying your products direct from your website or via a marketplace.
But how? How can smaller retailers Close the Gap and give consumers a best-in-class delivery and returns experience when they are up against the larger brands?
Join this webinar at 11am on the 29th of April to find out how to you can give customers a seamless delivery and returns experience and, beat the competition when it comes to conversion rates at checkout.
This webinar is aimed at online retailers who are shipping 50+ parcels per night and selling via their websites and/or marketplaces. If this applies to your business, please register.
What you’ll get from this ‘Close the Gap’ webinar
Top 5 insights from the latest research on what consumers expect from delivery and returns
What a ‘best-practice’ delivery & returns experience looks like
Practical and affordable ways to solve the problem
Seeing this in practice
Our guest speakers will be Bobbie Ttooulis, Group Marketing Director for GFS and, Phil Bradley-Smith, Technology Specialist for GFS
Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site.
If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re currently out of stock. The startup automatically finds a third-party Stockly supplier with that specific item.
The order will go through and be sent by that supplier directly. Stockly tells its partners to use neutral packaging so that the end consumer isn’t confused.
This could be particularly useful for small scale e-commerce companies that don’t have a healthy marketplace of third-party retailers. For instance, Amazon can already sell you an out-of-stock item if a supplier has listed that specific item on Amazon’s own marketplace. But that’s not the case for most e-commerce websites.
The main challenge for Stockly is that it has to sort through various catalog formats and match the different inventories of different retailers. It is focusing on clothing items at first. When an order is routed through Stockly, it selects a specific supplier based on different criteria, such as logistics, delivery time and historical data.
So far, Stockly has been working with Galeries Lafayette, Go Sport, Foot Shop and others. The startup has recently raised a $6 million (€5.1 million) funding round from Idinvest Partners, Daphni, Techstars, Checkout.com CEO Guillaume Pousaz and various business angels.
With this funding round, the company plans to expand its team to 20 people, add new clients and iterate on its product.
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Slice, the online ordering platform for independent pizzerias, announced two new offerings this morning — a point-of-sale system designed specifically for those businesses, as well as a rewards program for diners.
Pizzerias might seem to be a narrow focus for a point-of-sale system, particularly given all the other POS products out there, but Niehaus suggested that many of the 15,000 pizzerias in Slice’s network are still relying on cash registers and pen-and-paper: “If you run a pizzeria, you are certainly great at making pizza, but you are typically less comfortable with the accounting side.”
He also said that existing POS systems aren’t really designed for the needs and workflows of a pizzeria. Slice founder and CEO Ilir Sela added that most of them were designed for offline ordering first, with online support added later. And Niehaus suggested that the average local pizzeria is only seeing 19% of their orders coming from online sources (compared to 75% for the average Domino’s location), that’s a real problem.
“Domino’s is really the competition, not the POS companies,” he said.
Image Credits: Slice
So the Slice Register is a combined software and hardware (including an iPad) solution. Naturally, it integrates with Slice’s online ordering and also includes support for email and mobile marketing, as well as a consolidated view of each customer. Niehaus said that among other things, it’s designed to “grab those customers on one platform and nudge them online.”
Slice Register is available to pizzerias at no initial charge for the hardware or software. The only fee in 2021 will be for payment processing, with additional pricing announced coming next year.
As for the new Slice Rewards program, diners who order pizzas through Slice will get a free large cheese pizza for every eight orders of $15 or more. (Slice, not the restaurant, is paying for the free pizza.) Sela described this as a “very Domino’s-like program,” except that it works across independent pizzerias.
“What we’re learning the local consumer has up to four local favorites, and they love all of these locations equally,” he said. “What we think is really cool is, you’re going to get rewarded for buying at all four of your local favorites.”
A new study by Savoo that crowns Belgians as the world’s savviest spenders has also revealed which UK locations are home to the thriftiest shoppers. Lockdown has changed many of our spending habits and has allowed individuals a chance to save like never before. Shoppers are being extra savvy this year and are racking up some impressive savings.
The UK’s savviest spenders
The UK is not as conscious of saving money as some of the other countries and finds itself 8th on the global leaderboard with an average household saving of just £71 per year. This is largely due to the UK’s high household debt (£29,642) and lower average income in comparison to other nations (£20,675), according to OECD data.
By using the cost of living and monthly income to work out how much each person could potentially save, as well as looking into the number of Google searches for discount codes terms were made by each city, the locations where folks have the biggest stash of cash are revealed.
Rank
City
Google searches for discount terms per 1,000 people
Estimated cost of living
Potential monthly saving
1
Coventry
13.76
£1,330
£1,073
2
Glasgow
13.79
£1,268
£691
3
Leeds
9.28
£1,298
£713
4
Manchester
13.50
£1,488
£598
5
Leicester
14.56
£1,197
£530
Last place London
It’s probably not surprising that London comes in last place. Those living in the city having a potential monthly saving of just £292 thanks to the city’s unsurprisingly high living cost of £2,534 a month. Not only that, the study found that Londoners are not as interested in saving money when shopping online, the capital makes just 10 searches for every 1,000 people for discount terms.
Ireland home to the most bargain-hunting shoppers
The findings have also revealed that the Irish are the biggest second-hand shoppers. Caring the most about being sustainable shoppers, Ireland reigns supreme as the world’s most thrifty nation, with an impressive 33.2 secondhand Etsy products per million people compared to the UK that has less than half of that (14.2). Luxembourg followed in second place with 32 secondhand Etsy products per million people.
The worlds savviest spenders
If you interested in the top 5 ranking countries, home to the world’s savviest spenders then you can check them out below. As for the least savvy spenders, you can find those in Portugal (-2.5%), Latvia (-1.3%), Poland (-1%), Finland (-0.8%), New Zealand (-0.3%) and South Africa (-0.1%).
Rank
Country
Saving per Household (£)
Google searches for discount terms per 1,000 people
News that UK-based used car seller Cazoo intends to list in the United States via a SPAC is not surprising. After all, the SPAC boom we’ve seen in recent quarters means that there are a host of American blank-check companies in the market looking for deals — why would they stop at domestic borders?
But the Cazoo deal is not a surprise for other reasons as well. We’ve seen the value of related American company Carvana spike in recent years after its 2017 IPO, for example. And Carvana has shown the sort of gross-margin improvement that Cazoo intends to manage in the coming years, so there’s precedent for its sales model to show economic improvements over time..
But coming at the same time as a sunny investor deck detailing why the Cazoo-AJAX I deal is a good idea are a number of public-market trembles that could indicate uncertain risk tolerance among public investors. We can see this in the slack debut of several Chinese companies, as well as the downward pressure on the public offering for Deliveroo, a food-delivery platform.
Is the public market’s enthusiasm for tech listings slowing? If so, it would be bad news for companies that have announced SPAC-led debuts, firms like Latch that priced their combination during a particular market climate. One that won’t match well to a risk-off environment, if that’s where things head.
This morning, let’s parse the Cazoo deck briefly and then ask ourselves what the market tea leaves are telling us about investor appetite for risky shares.
Cazoo
After reading the Cazoo and Deliveroo news this morning, I have to ask if there’s something particularly British about companies ending in -oo. Let me know.
Regardless, the Cazoo investor deck for its SPAC deal is here. Follow along if you want. We’re starting on page 33, where the company discloses its 2020 results and forecasts the next several:
Via Cazoo’s investor deck.
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Cazoo is picking up significant capital today by teaming up with a SPAC in the U.S. at a $7 billion valuation, but it’s the end of the line for another big European name in used-car sales. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Berlin-based Frontier Car Group, which builds used-car marketplaces with a focus on emerging markets, is shutting down its operations in the city.
Its majority owner OLX Group, a division of Prosus (the tech holdings of Naspers that is now listed as a separate entity), said that it wants to refocus on more local operations in Latin America and Asia under its OLX Autos brand, into which it will fold in the remaining FCG operations.
The company currently has operations in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Peru. OLX Autos independently also had three other brands: CarFirst brand in Pakistan, Cars45 in Nigeria, and webuyanycar.com in the US.
OLX took a controlling stake in Frontier as a result of an investment of about $400 million in late 2019, valuing Frontier at around $700 million at the time. There was no official announcement of the closure, but we saw the news in passing on Twitter, and Prosus spokesperson confirmed the details to TechCrunch in a statement.
“OLX Group can confirm the closure of the FCG Germany GmbH entity based in Berlin over the coming months,” said the spokesperson. “This entity represents a subset of the OLX Group workforce in Berlin – other OLX Group employees in Berlin were not impacted by this entity closure, and those operations are ongoing. This decision to close FCG Germany GmbH was not taken lightly. The decision reflects the evolution of the OLX Autos strategy to focus more strongly on the LatAm and Asia markets. In order to have our development teams closer to our customers, we will shift core product development operations to India, a key market for OLX Autos. OLX Group is committed to taking care of our people in such a difficult situation and has offered a financial runway beyond what is compulsory, to allow time and flexibility to find new roles. Effected employees are being encouraged to apply for open roles within our other entities.”
About 100 people are being impacted by the news, the company confirmed to us and it looks to be an immediate move. If you go to FCG’s site now, it automatically redirects to OLX.
Although it was founded and headquartered in Berlin, Frontier Car Group had always focused on emerging markets and taking the used-car marketplace model to those countries.
Inspired by Cazoo rival Auto1 — another Berlin-based used-car marketplace that went public via a listing in Germany in February and is now valued at $12.6 billion (likely an encouraging comparison for Cazoo investors) — Frontier founders Sujay Tyle, Peter Lindholm and André Kussmann thought they could take that model to less developed markets for a bigger opportunity.
“I fell in love with the Auto1 model,” Tyle told TechCrunch back in 2018. “I could see how it could be applied to emerging markets. Emerging markets represent nascency.” Tyle himself is a whizz-kid who hails from the U.S. and was in his early 20s when he co-founded Frontier. He left it in August 2020 and now lives in Mexico City, building a new e-commerce investor there called Merama.
Frontier, in part because of the success of Auto1 (which took hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from the likes of Sequoia, SoftBank and others), became a part of the guard of exciting new tech startups building businesses out of Berlin.
That focus on emerging markets linked up Naspers’ global expansion strategy, and so OLX, a classifieds operation that had an interest in automotive marketplaces, became a strategic investor in Frontier, first with a smaller stake, and eventually taking majority ownership and control of the operation.
It’s not clear why OLX decided to wind down the Frontier brand and to double down OLX Autos but notably, over the last year it looks like OLX was restructuring in other markets, including with the layoff of 250 people in its operations in India after shutting down marketplaces focused on real estate and used goods.
While some companies like Cazoo have apparently seen a strong surge of business in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the health crisis has hit a number of economies, economic sectors and specific companies harder than others, leading to tightening costs. Overall, we’ve seen big slumps in new car sales in different markets around the world.
A Prosus spokesperson said that both OLX and OLX Autos were impacted at the start of Covid-19 but have since recovered. Prosus has remained profitable in what has been a turbulent year, but some have pointed out that those profits have declined. (It will next update its financials in June.)
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Amazon pushes back against unionization, WeWork eyes the SPAC route and there’s new spyware on Android. This is your Daily Crunch for March 26, 2021.
The big story: Amazon makes PR push ahead of union vote
Workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama (a suburb of Birmingham) will vote next week on whether to unionize. In the meantime, Amazon is waging an aggressive PR campaign against the effort and the politicians who support it.
For example, in a response to news that Senator Bernie Sanders would be visiting Amazon workers, executive Dave Clark tweeted, “I welcome @SenSanders to Birmingham and appreciate his push for a progressive workplace. I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.” Meanwhile, the Amazon News account scoffed at Representative Mark Pocan for repeating accounts of Amazon workers peeing in water bottles: “If that were true, nobody would work for us.”
In response, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (which the Amazon workers would be joining if the unionization effort succeeds) put out a statement asking, “How arrogant and tone deaf can Amazon be?”
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
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