The future of retail and how small businesses can stay relevant

In this guest post today, Kate Lester, founder and CEO of Diamond Logistics, offers a fearless opinion on the future of retail.

We can see light at the end of the tunnel. Shops are opening, but the reality is retail habits have changed forever. As a class A shopaholic, I will be first out of the blocks. But shopping habits have undoubtedly changed.

Some people will never go back to shopping the way they used to. The elderly, infirm or very time pressed. There is gold in these markets if you target them in a way that is attractive.

Commodities or specialist goods are perfect for online. Household product sites like Bother makes it very easy to order bulky and cost-effective goods direct to your home. Equally specialist goods – like Sacred Gin – are easier to source online as there are very few stockists of this premium product.

It’s the stuff you want to try on, touch, feel or see – like furniture – that will drive retail moving forward.

For example, buying shoes online is very hit and miss, as is buying furniture. The look, feel and weight of shows is a touch based experience.

A lot of people like their Saturday food shopping – I can’t see this being eroded entirely – and substitution is annoying. But shopping at Waitrose for a few key products – and getting the bulk on Ocado – is a way of mixing modes of purchase and retaining the best bits for the consumer. And who wants to log huge bags of shopping when you can get it delivered for a £5? And also its those last minute things – the capers and anchovies you decide you need for your dinner party – that your local delicatessen will always be strong at supplying.

There’s also a trend for convenience and local. My grocery preference at the moment is Co-op or Sainsbury’s local – with a weekend top up at Waitrose and M&S – spreading the pounds dependant on need.

Big retailers

Retailers have to embrace multi-modal experiences – click & collect, home delivery and retail experiences.

Retail experiences will continue to be a thing – but it will be a big day out – so they have to be fun and engaging. You won’t just pop to the shops – there will have to be further motivation. Ikea has this nailed – albeit their delivery items on line aren’t great at present. (Ikea if you need a hand you know where we are!).

Ikea is a great day out. They not only showcase all their products in enviable showrooms so you can aspire to creating that space in your home, they offer a crèche and canteen – not to mention the inimitable meatballs – all of which make a great trip for the family.
Some key purchases will always be more aligned to a shop purchase. Car, furniture and carpet textiles for example, because the online experience is either slow (if you ask for samples and have to wait for them to be despatched for example). Whereas if you go to John Lewis Home, you can see, touch and feel your purchase on the same day.

There will be more showcasing in retail, whilst ordering will still be online. And customers will seek goods on multiple platforms – sale items on eBay and retailer sites with enhanced search facilities. It still staggers me that when you search for some standard items you can’t find them on Google search. Retailers have to really master their digital marketing to stay ahead.

Small retailers

Small retailers need to build their brand and a local following for a dedicated audience. They are going to have to drive loyalty to win custom.

Use multiple platforms and a united inventory system to enable customers to buy from you and use the power of these platform’s search engines to drive sales. It’s more likely eBay and Etsy will pip them to the post, rather than their own SEO.

Utilise Google Shopping – it still gobsmacks me that it’s (mostly) cheap importers which have mastered this – quality products are underrepresented.

Drive traffic through audience building on social – build that loyal base – and push offers out which lead to a shop experience for upselling opportunities.

You still have to bat above your average in terms of delivery, shop experience or online (either own site or marketplace).

Experiential retail will drive customers, a day out not a pop to the shops. Other retail will become either a client loyalty driver – small, boutique, specialist, local – or simply a showcase.

Keep up with consumer demand – driving faster and faster deliveries. Sameday fulfilment is just around the corner and this will be a great step forward on the multi-modal retail revolution.

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Codeless Platforms and ShipStation announce new partnership

Codeless Platforms have signed a strategic partnership with ShipStation to enable customers to fully automate and streamline business processes, driving customer satisfaction and business growth.

“Brands, manufacturers and retailers are using an increasing number of specialist point solutions to help them execute their vision and plan. But with a diverse technology estate comes complexity. People are having to balance best in class solutions, with seamless and frictionless interoperability so their data flows through the business is key. Partnerships with leading iPaaS platforms provide our customers with the means to bring it all together.”
– Andrew Norman, Managing Director International, ShipStation

Codeless Platforms’ ShipStation Connector can quickly and easily integrate ShipStation with ERP systems. (SAP Business One, SAP Business ByDesign, Sage 200, Sage 1000, Sage X3, SYSPRO, Epicor, Access Dimensions, Microsoft Dynamics (NAV / Business Central), Exact), CRM (Salesforce, Sage CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM etc.) warehouse management (WMS), and multi-channel eCommerce software (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop).

This provides the ability to automatically read and write data to and from ShipStation and other cloud-based or on-premises business systems, such as pushing orders from an ERP system into ShipStation and automatically updating an ERP system with delivery data from ShipStation without employee data entry.

“ShipStation is an excellent delivery management system that can bring in orders from a wide range of sales channels, as well as connect to over 100 different stores, marketplaces and delivery services. Adding Codeless Platforms’ ShipStation integration solution will enable customers to further extend and enhance eCommerce and order management processes throughout their business, helping to improve efficiencies and provide better insight into data management.”
– Matthew Lidster, Managing Director, Codeless Platforms

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India’s ElasticRun raises $75 million to grow its commerce platform for neighborhood stores

A startup that is helping over 125,000 neighborhood stores in India secure working capital, inventory from top brands, and work with e-commerce firms to boost revenues said on Thursday it has raised a new financing round as it looks to further its reach in the world’s second largest internet market.

Pune-based ElasticRun said it has raised $75 million in its Series D financing round co-led by existing investors Avataar Ventures and Prosus Ventures. Existing investor Kalaari Capital also participated in the round, which takes the four-year-old startup’s to-date raise to $130.5 million.

Millions of neighborhood stores that dot large and small cities, towns and villages in India and have proven tough to beat for e-commerce giants and super-chain retailers are at the center of a new play in the country.

A score of e-commerce companies, offline retail chains and fintech startups are now racing to work with these mom and pop stores as they look to tap a massive untapped opportunity.

Sandeep Deshmukh, co-founder and CEO of ElasticRun, talking about the startup’s business at a conference in 2019.

ElasticRun helps merchants operating these stores, who typically have to spend a few days a month visiting bigger cities to secure inventory, get reliable and more affordable goods directly from big brands. (Big brands love this because this enables them to significantly expand their reach.)

These store owners also spend a number of hours a day not doing much when the business is slow. ElasticRun is also addressing this by partnering with some of the biggest e-commerce firms including Amazon and Flipkart to utilize this workforce to make deliveries to customers. (E-commerce firms find value in this because neighborhood stores have a larger presence in the country, can reach a customer much faster, and also often have their own inventory.)

Ashutosh Sharma, Head of Investments for India at Prosus Ventures, told TechCrunch that ElasticRun has built a variable capacity, crowdsourced delivery model, which distinguishes the startup from other players in the market that have a fixed number of people on payrolls making these deliveries. He said as the startup has developed the railroads, a number of new opportunities has unlocked.

One such opportunity is providing working capital to these neighborhood stores. Their operators typically don’t have savings, and need to sell the existing inventory to secure funds to refill the stock. In recent years, ElasticRun has struck partnerships with banks and NBFCs to provide credit to these merchants.

ElasticRun today operates in over 300 cities in nearly all Indian states. The startup works with over 125,000 neighborhood stores, and plans to expand to reach 1 million in 18 to 24 months, said Shitiz Bansal, co-founder and chief technology officer of ElasticRun, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The startup’s current run rate is about $350 million, a figure it plans to grow to over $1 billion in the next 12 months, he said.

Saurabh Nigam, co-founder and chief operating officer, said the new financing round has also enabled the startup to offer early employees access to “tangible benefits” of the firm’s growth over the last five years.

From India’s richest man to Amazon and 100s of startups: The great rush to win neighborhood stores

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The SPAC boom isn’t just here to stay, it’s changing consumer tech

Mike Murphy Contributor

Mike Murphy is the founder and CEO of Rosecliff Ventures, a New York City-based investment firm focused on venture capital and private equity opportunities.

Consumer technology is an inherently risky investment sector: even the best idea can fall flat if the story of the product is not sold properly to the end user. The stats can only take you so far, and, eventually, customers want to believe in the product.

Traditionally, companies that have successfully told their story and become market leaders have taken the initial public offering route — pitching their story to institutional investors on banker-led roadshows rather than to the people that buy their products.

But the last 18 months have seen a new door open for companies seeking to skip the bankers, partner with good managers, and gain a more direct route to public capital: merging with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC.

For the right consumer technology companies — for which the story is often just as, if not more, important than the financial figures — a SPAC deal offers a more direct access to public capital. Instead of walking institutional investors through the P&L, these companies can spend more time telling investors, including the retail investors using the products, what the company can be long-term.

There is no denying the growing popularity of this avenue to public exchanges: more than 200 companies went public via a SPAC deal in 2020. But as with any asset that grows hot, there will be parties out there expecting it to blow up.

Lessons have been learned and we probably have more coming, but those who treat SPACs as a sign of the end-days of economic recovery are wrong. These vehicles offer a legitimate route to the public markets while stripping out traditional gatekeepers and allowing individual investors to decide if they want to buy — or sell — a company’s story.

The SPAC bubble claim

First, it is important to address the naysayers’ concerns. Given the meteoric rise in SPAC activity, analysts speculate that the trend is overblown; they argue that companies are listing too early and that money losers are getting access to public capital before they deserve it.

But when is it “too early” to enter the public market? DraftKings, one of the most successful SPAC stories of 2020, went public about eight years after it was founded, and Facebook was private for a similar length of time before its IPO. Meanwhile, Apple, the most profitable company in the world, listed less than four years after its founding. Tenure may be a factor in investors’ minds, but lack thereof has never stopped a company from listing on the public markets.

Profitability has also rarely been a requirement for an IPO. Uber, Tesla, and Amazon are all prime examples of unprofitable businesses that listed while reporting losses.

In all these examples, clear, coherent visions, strong leadership teams, and patience from investors to see leaders execute on their vision overcame the traditional financial barometers of success.

The market knows how to value a story

The public markets are obsessed with quarterly results. A company can miss analysts’ expectations for earnings per share by just a cent and its stock will be sent tumbling. However, not all companies are assessed this way: Many companies are valued on their vision for the future and their progress towards their goals. SPACs are an effective way to invest in a strong team or vision even when there’s not enough financial data to back a traditional investment.

Biotech firms are an excellent and timely example of the way investors are looking at the market, especially post-pandemic. Biotechs usually describe a treatment they are developing and the patients it could help; they provide estimates of the addressable market, the price they could charge, and the timeline they could expect to get through clinical trials. However, an early-phase biotech could be years away from selling any drugs, let alone turning a profit. The FDA estimates the time to complete Phase II and Phase III trials, the final phases before applying for approval, can total up to six years.

Yet, investors pour money into these companies. Analysts estimate the likelihood of a drug advancing in its trials after detailed scrutiny, but these companies can see their stocks rise for years while losing money. The markets will expect high returns for taking these risks, but they can arrive at a price nonetheless.

Two investors weigh in: Is your SPAC just a PIPE dream?

The storytellers of consumer tech

The SPAC route is a match made in heaven for consumer tech companies: SPACs put more of a focus on the management team and the vision than traditional IPOs, which is a boon for the sector, as this industry has always been dominated by visionaries.

Looking ahead, the savviest investors in SPACs will be paying close attention to direct-to-consumer technology, but not in the traditional, limited sense of D2C.

Consumers are looking for goods and services that they can access more quickly and reliably than ever before. Conveniently, the companies that tend to succeed in ramping up these options through technology are natural storytellers that know how to bring their product directly to the end-user. Inevitably, these firms are going to be on the radar of SPAC investors.

For example, fintech, in many ways, has become direct-to-consumer because it offers customers banking features directly on their phones. In just the last year, innovation in telemedicine has brought most health appointments from the waiting room to the living room, and forced outdated healthcare administration practices to embrace digital systems.

Products you could only buy at physical stores, like mattresses, can now be delivered straight to your door with companies like Casper and Purple. Certain auto companies will allow you to even design and buy a car as easily as ordering a pizza.

The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this trend by exposing the need for faster, tech-driven access to services, and our “return to normal” means this trend is only going upwards. SPACs will be around to bring these ideas to market faster and provide the capital these companies need to meet the demand.

The road ahead

Despite the speculation, naysaying and “bubble” talk, SPACs have been around for decades and aren’t going to disappear in a flash. Indeed, the pace of SPAC deals might cool down and carry a higher risk premium as the trend continues, but just like the changes in consumer technology, SPACs themselves will evolve to best serve their consumers.

In many ways, the SPAC model is very similar to the way consumer technology has developed: It encourages disruption of established constructs. What’s more, investors in pre-acquisition SPACs get access to venture-like opportunities without the capital traditionally required for such investments.

In the end, a company’s success will depend on it meeting or exceeding targets, or if something pulls demand forward. The rules have not changed, and neither has the risk or the reward.

Private equity, a SPAC and an IPO walk into a bar

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How Shopify aims to level the playing field with its machine learning-driven model of lending

Shopify is widely known for giving independent merchants a platform to start, run, market and manage their businesses.

But over the past 5 years, the company has been steadily growing another part of its own business: Shopify Capital. Through this arm, the Canadian commerce giant revealed today that it has provided $2 billion in funding to tens of thousands of entrepreneurs.

Besides being a cool milestone, how it works is interesting. Merchants don’t necessarily have to apply for loans. Shopify’s machine learning models identify eligible merchants based on their previous sales history and store performance, according to Solmaz Shahalizadeh, vice president of data science and engineering, commerce intelligence at Shopify. If a merchant accepts a pre-approved offer, they can generally receive funding in 2 to 5 business days.

While the milestone is significant, I was especially intrigued by the model by which Shopify lends money to its merchants. 

It is intentional about using machine learning and AI “to make sure offers are based on factors different from any other in the financial industry,” Shahalizadeh said. “We don’t ask for a business plan. Our models see the business performance and it’s potential and makes an offer based on that.”

“We use 70 million data points to understand larger trends across the platform for merchants, and can see they are growing before they even can so we can preemptively offer them,” she added.

Kaz Nejatian, vice president of merchant services at Shopify, emphasizes that Shopify Capital does not lend in the manner of traditional banks by charging interest on loans.

“Our funding is designed to work off sales. If you don’t sell anything, we don’t get paid back until you make sales,” Nejatian said. “It’s a highly merchant aligned form of funding designed to fund the type of people banks and VCs won’t fund.”

The company’s model also aims to eliminate any biases that exist in the current financial system, when it comes to educational background, ethnicity, race or gender, he added.

For Nejatian, it’s also personal. His mother is a Shopify merchant who herself struggled with getting capital herself last year.

“Our goal is to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship by offering access to funds,” he said.

As part of that effort, Shopify Capital has increased the maximum amount of funding to $2 million. Previously, it granted funds ranging from $200 to $1 million.

Shopify offers two types of funding – merchant cash advances and loans. Shopify Capital charges a fixed fee (factor rate) on its financings.

On a merchant cash advance for example, it purchases $10,000 of a merchant’s future receivables in exchange for a promise to remit $10,900 of their future sales. The $900 is the amount it charges for the financing, and is repaid by a merchant’s daily remittances on days they make sales.

On its loans, it also applies a similar fixed fee to get a total repayment number, which is repaid via daily payments and milestone payments.

Simply put, the fixed fee that it charges is how Shopify earns money in exchange for funding our merchants. This fee, plus the amount advanced, are returned to the company over the life of a financing via daily remittance payments.

Says the company: “By charging a fixed fee, a merchant is able to understand exactly how much they’ll be expected to repay, before they take financing from Shopify Capital. These amounts don’t change over the life of a financing.”

Over time, Shopify plans to continually improve the machine learning algorithm behind Capital, making its predictive model “even smarter,” Shahalizadeh said. 

“Our model allows us to predict merchants’ minimum sales with 90% accuracy while helping us make more proactive, pre-qualified offers as quickly as possible,” she added.

Shopify merchant Steven Borrelli, Founder of CUTS, says that when he was looking for funding as a newer business, he ran into the challenge of most traditional banks and lenders wanting to see that he had been in business for several years.

CUTS started with getting $2,000 in funding from Shopify Capital. Over the last three years, it has grown into a business with sales “in the tens of millions.”

“We found Shopify Capital to be so valuable that we’ve returned for 10 rounds of funding. Our most recent round of Shopify Capital was $1 million,” he said. “So far we’ve used the funding for expanding our product line and growing our inventory.”

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Armed with $160M in funding, LatAm’s Merama enters the e-commerce land grab

Merama, a five-month old e-commerce startup focused on Latin America, announced today that it has raised $60 million in seed and Series A funding and $100 million in debt.

The money was raised “at well over a $200 million valuation,” according to co-founder and CEO Sujay Tyle.  

“We are receiving significant inbound for a Series B already,” he said.

LatAm firms Valor Capital and Monashees Capital and U.K.-based Balderton Capital co-led the “massively oversubscribed” funding round, which also included participation from Silicon Valley-based Triplepoint Capital and the CEOs of four unicorns in Latin America, including Uala, Loggi, Rappi and Madeira Madeira. 

Tyle, Felipe Delgado, Olivier Scialom, Renato Andrade and Guilherme Nosralla started Merama in December 2020 with a vision to be the “largest and best-selling set of brands in Latin America.” The company has dual headquarters in Mexico City and São Paulo.

Merama partners with e-commerce product sellers in Latin America by purchasing a stake in the businesses and working with their teams to help them “exponentially” grow and boost their technology while providing them with nondilutive working capital. CEO Tyle describes the company’s model as “wildly different” from that of Thras.io, Perch and other similar companies such as Valoreo because it does not aggregate dozens of brands.

“We will work with very few brands over time, and only the best, and work with our entire team to scale and expand these few businesses,” Tyle told TechCrunch. “We’re more similar to The Hut Group in the EU.”

Merama expects to sell $100 million across the region this year, more than two times the year before. It is currently focused on Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Already, the company operates “very profitably,” according to Tyle. So the cash raised will go primarily toward partnering with more brands, investing in building its technology platform “to aid in the automation of several facets” of its partners’ brands and in working capital for product innovation and inventory purchases. 

The 42-person team is made up of e-commerce leaders from companies such as Amazon, Mercado Libre and Facebook, among others. Tyle knows a thing or two about growing and building new startups, having co-founded Frontier Car Group, which sold to OLX/Naspers for about $700 million in 2019. He is also currently a venture partner at Balderton. 

It’s a fact that Latin American e-commerce has boomed, particularly during the pandemic. Mexico was the fastest-growing e-commerce market in 2020 worldwide, yet is still in its infancy, Tyle said. Overall, the $85 billion e-commerce market in Latin America is growing rapidly, with projections of it reaching $116.2 billion in 2023.

“Merchants are seeing hypergrowth but still struggle with fundamental problems, which creates a ceiling in their potential,” Tyle told TechCrunch. “For example, they are unable to expand internationally, get reliable and cost-effective working capital and build technology tools to support their own online presence. This is where Merama comes in. We seek to give our partners an unfair advantage. When we decide to work with a team, it is because we believe they will be the de facto category leader and can become a $1 billion business on their own.”

Merama collaborates with e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Mercado Libre, and several executives from both companies have invested in the startup, as well.

Latin America’s digital transformation is making up for lost time

Daniel Waterhouse, partner at Balderton Capital, says his firm sees “huge potential” in Merama.

“In our two decades scaling businesses in Europe, we have seen firsthand what defines eCommerce category leaders,” he said in a written statement. “What they have already achieved is breathtaking, and it is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Valor Capital founding partner Scott Sobel believes that creating superior products that connect with consumers is the first key challenge D2C companies face.

“That is why we like Merama’s approach to partnering with these established brands and provide them unparalleled support to scale their operations in an efficient way,” he added.

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Starting a business – Start Up Donut podcast

The UK is experiencing a start-up boom. More than 770,000 people ended up started a business in 2020 – a huge increase on the more usual annual tally of 660,000. Starting a business is cheaper, quicker and easier than ever. People of all ages, from all over the UK, from all manner of backgrounds are now starting their own business.

Those starting a business need reliable advice, so they can make good decisions and avoid expensive mistakes. With need-to-know advice from small-business experts and tips from those who’ve started their own business, the Start Your Own Business podcast is essential listening if you’re starting your own business (or thinking about it). Set up your new business in the right way and get off to the best possible start.

I was pleased to join the series to talk to those considering starting a business focused on selling online, whether via marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon and Etsy, or your own ecommerce or general website. Over the years I have met many who started a business and built massively successful online ventures and the one common denominator is that they all started by listing and selling their first product. So many talk about their desire to start a business but spend all their time talking about it and thinking about it without getting around to doing the very basics of getting started.

I firmly believe that the time for talking is done and if you want to be successful then there is absolutely nothing to prevent you starting a business today. And I mean today, not this weekend or next week!

The whole series is essential listening for anyone who wants to start a business so if that’s you, or you know someone that would like to be in charge of their own destiny, point them to the Start Up Donut website where, in association with the Federation of Small Businesses, they can listen to the whole series.

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PayPal’s ambition and uphill battle in China

Over the last few months, PayPal has been quietly gearing up for its expansion in China.

At the recent Boao Forum for Asia, China’s answer to Davos, the American payments giant said its strategy for China is not to challenge the duopoly of Alipay and WeChat Pay. Instead, it wants to focus on cross-border business and provide gateways both for Chinese merchants to collect funds and for Chinese consumers to pay for overseas goods.

It’s certainly a lucrative area. The market size of cross-border e-commerce in China surged from about 3 trillion yuan ($460 million) to nearly 6 trillion yuan between 2016 and 2021, according to market research firm iResearch.

But this space has also become crowded in recent years and PayPal may be late to the fray, said a China-based manager for an American tech giant, who asked for anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to the media.

On Amazon, one of the largest marketplaces for Chinese exporters to sell online, there are already established options for merchants to collect funds. Setting up a bank account in a foreign country can be difficult for a small-time Chinese exporter, not to mention the high fees for remittance, so such merchants often seek third-party payments transfer solutions such as U.S.-based Payoneer and Chinese equivalents Pingpong and Lianlian, which charge a relatively small fee to deposit merchants’ sales into their bank accounts at home.

China has stringent policies for foreign exchange and electronic payments, but PayPal has already cleared the regulatory hurdles. In January, the American fintech titan became the first foreign firm to hold a license for online payment processor in China after it bought out shares in a local payments firm.

Obtaining the government greenlight is just the first step. The appeal of PayPal hinges largely on what it can offer to Chinese e-commerce exporters, who are now flooding the likes of Amazon and eBay.

“At the end of the day, customers only care which service is the cheapest and easiest to use,” said the China-based manager from the American firm.

“The Chinese cross-border payment solutions have achieved impressive results in terms of products, scale, and fees,” the person said. “I don’t think PayPal stands a chance.”

Exporters who build their own online stores instead of selling on mainstream marketplaces may still find PayPal necessary as a tool to accept payments from customers, given the app’s wide reach.

As for cross-border payments, PayPal is competing with Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Ant Group’s Alipay, which have long been ubiquitous in China. Both e-wallets have been aggressively growing their global partnerships to let China’s outbound travelers pay at overseas retailers like they would at home. Those shopping for overseas products domestically often use Chinese-owned e-commerce apps, which tend to have Alipay or WeChat Pay as their payment processor. Credit cards never became prevalent in China.

Cross-border payments have also become one of Ant’s main growth goals, according to the prospectus of its now-halted initial public offering. While overseas businesses accounted for just about 5% of the firm’s revenue in the second half of 2020, most of that segment came from cross-border payments. At the time, Ant also had plans to spend HK$52.8 billion, or 40%, of the net proceeds from its IPO on expanding its cross-border payment and merchant services as well as other overseas functionalities.

“It depends on whether PayPal is able to offer even lower fees than Ant,” said a person who previously worked on cross-border wallets for a Chinese company. “But PayPal itself is not famous for low fees.”

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Ivorian startup Afrikrea partners with DHL and Visa to launch SaaS e-commerce platform ANKA

In 2016, Ivorian e-commerce startup Afrikrea started as a marketplace for African-based and inspired clothing, accessories, arts, and crafts. Over the past five years, Afrikrea has served more than 7,000 sellers from 47 African countries and buyers from 170 countries.

Per the company’s data, it records more than 500,000 visits monthly, with the majority of its customers from Europe and North America recording over $15 million in transactions.

But while Afrikrea presents African merchants to showcase and sell their products to the world, it is just one of the many channels available, including personal websites and social media.

Co-founder and CEO Moulaye Taboure says that he noticed that merchants were splitting time and concentration across different channels, which affected their engagement with Afrikrea.

“We noticed that it was getting harder for our sellers to make sales because they were losing time, money and energy switching between channels,” Taboure told TechCrunch. “Every time they want to sell a product, they put it on social media, Afrikrea, and other websites. And when one buyer shows interest, there is no single place to track and see all the orders. That’s hard for these businesses to offer quality services and grow effectively.”

Then last year, Afrikrea began testing an all-in-one SaaS e-commerce platform for these merchants. Today, it is announcing its launch. The platform called ANKA will allow users to sell from Africa, ship products to anywhere in the world and get paid through local and international African payment methods.

Image Credits:

E-commerce, payments and global shipping. That’s ANKA’s play for thousands of micro-retailers and businesses on the continent and around the world.

The platform lets users sell via an omnichannel dashboard with a single inventory, orders and messages management. Customers can carry out transactions via a customized online storefront like Shopify, social media platforms, links such as on Gumroad and the Afrikrea marketplace.

Merchants can carry out payments and payouts via a wallet and an Afrikrea Visa card. The platform, which costs $12, allows customers to perform mobile money and mobile banking transactions with MPesa, Orange, MTN and PayPal. 

Shipping completes the entire sales life cycle, from the point of sale to receipt of goods. In 2019, Afrikrea partnered with global logistics partner DHL to offer shipping services to its customers.

Visa’s Africa strategy banks on startup partnerships

Fashion is ANKA’s best-selling category because of its affiliation with Afrikrea. The African fashion and apparel market is worth $31billion, per Euromonitor, and Afrikrea estimates the yearly spend of its major markets to be worth $12.5 billion. A breakdown from the company puts “the African diaspora in Europe at $1 billion, those in America and the Caribbean at $9 billion and non-Africans with links to the continent at $2.5 billion.”

But in terms of general e-commerce activities on the continent, McKinsey & Company pegs consumer spending to reach $2.1 trillion by 2025. African e-commerce is also expected to account for up to 10% of retail sales.

Platforms like Jumia, Mall4Africa and Takealot have been at the forefront of this growth over this past decade. MallforAfrica struck a partnership with DHL in 2015, then launched DHL Africa eShop with the logistics giant four years later. More than 200 sellers from the U.S. and U.K. serve African consumers in more than 30 countries on the platform.

Jumia co-CEO Jeremy Hodara talks African e-commerce and his company’s path to profitability

Unlike MallforAfrica and other e-commerce platforms, ANKA differentiates itself as a platform for export rather than import, specifically for African products. According to Moulaye, ANKA is currently the largest e-commerce exporter on the continent, and since its partnership with DHL, it has shipped more than 10 tons of cargo monthly from Africa. 

“We are the biggest client of DHL exporting from Africa. We ship 10 tons every month and have sellers in 47 African countries, with Kenya and Nigeria as our largest markets. We have something African that is going to a global scale. That’s one of the angles we had with Afrikrea, and we want to keep that with ANKA. What sets us apart is that we’re not just trying to solve a purely African problem; we want to solve a global problem for Africans.”

Since launching five years ago, Afrikrea, which Taboure launched with Luc B. Perussault Diallo and Kadry Diallo, has raised a total of $2.1 million per Crunchbase. In this period, the company has seen its revenue grow 5x and claims to have ARR more than it has raised in its lifetime. To continue its growth efforts, Afrikrea is in the process of concluding a Series A round later this year.

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Greece’s Viva Wallet raises $80M for its neo-bank targeting small business merchants

Challenger banks continue to make significant waves in the world of finance, with smaller outfits luring customers away from incumbents by providing an easier way for them to not only engage with basic banking services, but to tap into a wave of technology that brings more personalization and often better deals into the equation. In the latest development, Viva Wallet, a Greek startup building banking services aimed at small and medium merchants, has picked up financing of $80 million, money that it will be using to expand its footprint and the services that it is offering to users, in particular expanding its Merchant Advance loans business.

The company is already live in 23 European markets and plans soon to expand that to Croatia, Hungary and Sweden.

The funding is notable in part because of who is doing the investing. Tencent — the Chinese technology giant behind Wechat that is also making major inroads into financial services — is in the round, alongside the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Breyer Capital.

Viva Wallet is not disclosing its valuation right now, but it means business. Yannis Larios, the company’s VP of strategy and business development, confirmed to us that it’s in the middle of closing a large Series D — last August sized at €500 million ($603 million) — that will value it at €1.5 billion ($1.8 billion). This is a big leap: he also noted that when Viva Wallet closed its Series C in the second half of 2019, it was valued at €305 million.

“We are excited to onboard Tencent, EBRD and Breyer Capital to Viva Wallet,” said Haris Karonis, Founder and CEO of Viva Wallet, in a statement. “We are confident that our investors’ extensive know-how and network of partnerships will accelerate Viva Wallet’s plan to unify the fragmented European payments market. The technology innovations that we are bringing forward to European merchants will help them provide a frictionless, localised payment experience to all their clients, and liberate them from the hassle of maintaining legacy card terminals.”

The round is notable for coming at a time when Europe is slowly, hopefully poking its head out from under the weight of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has shaken and knocked over many an economy already wobbling even before the public health crisis. Focused primarily on merchants, Viva Wallet is a prime example of the kind of tech business that might help some of these critical businesses recover.

If you think that the world of neo-banks is very crowded — and that specifically neo-banks focussed on the SMB opportunity is also getting crowded — one reason why Viva Wallet is getting some attention is because of its traction and track record so far.

Larios says that the startup has been profitable as of Q1 of this year, on the back of a business that has grown by more than 40% in the last year, with 60,000 merchants currently active on its books. It’s on track, he said, for that number to be 100,000 by the end of this year.

One reason for its success, he said, is that it’s taken a very localized approach to growth, setting up operations with physical branches in each of the countries where it is active — somewhat of a retro idea in today’s market where banks are regularly shutting down their brick-and-mortar locations and going virtual. “Viva Wallet is proving the resilience of its business model,” he said.

The funding will be used in part to build out its loans program but also to expand areas where Viva Wallet is already strong. One of these is its point of sale Tap-On-Phone solution, which turns any Android device (smartphone, tablet or enterprise device) into a card terminal, to accept both contactless and PIN payments without the need for separate hardware. (Most POS systems use small, separate terminals that will connect to a tablet or phone.)

He also said there will be some M&A in the future to expand to more markets more quickly.

One area where the company will not expand is into the consumer space. Other neo-banks like Revolut and Atom have leveraged their traction with younger consumers to move into providing services for the enterprises that they found, but Larios that that is not a strategy that Viva Wallet will take in the reverse, not least because the consumer market has so far proven to be a tough-margin (or even bad-margin) game.

“Viva Wallet focuses on businesses only and will continue to do so!” he said (exclamation his!). “The consumer segment is not providing any space for profitability and we are seeing that all competing neo-bank business models focusing on consumers are mostly burning money away.

“We are focusing on the SMEs of Europe, providing a pan-European payments solution which however is very much localized to address merchants’ true local needs in terms of local payments acceptance, local IBAN accounts, local BIN business debit cards etc.” But while Viva Wallet may have a lot of SMB customers — and the EBRD investment is definitely being made to endorse that — he points out that it also includes medium businesses and some enterprises — larger merchants like supermarket chains, for example — and that will be an area it will continue to expand in.

This gives Viva Wallet enough specialization and differentiation, alongside its profitability in targeting those areas so far, to bring in the big name investors keen to tap into economic recovery, both to help that along and to ride the wave of that as it pays dividends.

“We are very excited to help Viva Wallet unify the fragmented European payments ecosystem across 23 countries. Viva Wallet is at the forefront of a paradigm shift for fintech and together, we expect to transform the payments industry in Europe” said Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital, in a statement.

“Tencent shares Viva Wallet’s aspirations of creating value for users and partners through innovation. We look forward to supporting Viva Wallet in its expansion across Europe,” added Danying Ma, MD of Tencent Investment.

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aisle 3 successfully raises £250,000 and why you should care

Ecommerce startup aisle 3 has completed a successful follow on funding round, raising £250,000 via Angel Investment Network, the world’s largest online angel investment network. Aiming to become ‘the Wikipedia of product search’ the business secured the funds in just six weeks with the company’s valuation more than doubling in the past five months. Experienced angel investors have backed the founders’ vision for a new, disruptive ecommerce marketplace offering truly personalised experiences for large networks of engaged shoppers.

ecommerce startup aisle 3 has completed a successful follow on funding round, raising £250,000 via Angel Investment Network, the world’s largest online angel investment network. Aiming to become ‘the Wikipedia of product search’ the business secured the funds in just six weeks with the company’s valuation more than doubling in the past five months. Experienced angel investors have backed the founders’ vision for a new, disruptive ecommerce marketplace offering truly personalised experiences for large networks of engaged shoppers.

This raise is the second completed successfully in just five months, with the company being backed with almost £500,000 in pre-seed funding. It represents an impressive trajectory for a startup born during the height of the pandemic that has been built entirely remotely. Founded in March 2020, aisle 3 aims to give shoppers the complete view of all of their buying options on a single screen, so that they can make purchase decisions based on their personal values such as price, delivery, locality, sustainability or brand loyalty.

What’s the big deal with aisle 3?

Having launched initially within trainers, aisle 3 aggregates retailer offers and rich product information by deploying machine learning and AI algorithms. The team has developed their proprietary web crawler, software and product aggregation algorithms from scratch. The funds will be used towards further developing the brand’s product, tech build and scaling the team.

This is actually a really interesting business – while there is a certain tranche of shoppers who always start their search on Amazon, there is another who always start on eBay. You’ll often find products on one site priced differently on the other. That’s just the two ecommerce giants in the UK – when it comes to shopping your favourite independent website how often do you compare prices and how easy is it?

Say you’re after DIY tools, do you go to eBay, Amazon, B&Q, Jewsons, Wickes, Screwfix and any number of a myriad of other DIY suppliers to check prices, or do you just check one or two sites and press the buy button? Products from manufactures like Draper or Stanley will appear on all of these sites so how do you get the best deal? aisle 3 reckon that they have the solution.

aisle 3 are also a vehicle where smaller retailers, without the budgets for paid search that the mammoth ecommerce giants have, can compete and that’s where it gets really interesting – It’s early days as trainers is a niche but vibrant category, as aisle 3 build out their platform this will be one to watch.

The co-founders Thomas J. Vosper and James Valbuena have 30+ years of collective ecommerce experience at retailers including Amazon, Tesco, Lastminute, VASHI. In a short space of time they have grown to serve 2,000 organic shoppers each day, have a waiting list of over 600 signed retailers, and 20+ Digital Agencies with more than a million products.

“We are thrilled to have conducted our second successful raise in just five months backed by our current investors who saw our progress as well as gaining the trust of significant new investors. Raising investment in any climate is very difficult and takes hours of meetings, calls and late nights; so having subject matter experts buy into our vision of building a scalable, disruptive business and cleaning up the standard of product information is a huge validation of our mission and the team we have put together.
 
We believe shoppers are short changed in getting the best deals despite the illusion of choice on the internet. Whilst it is incredibly easy to book complex products such as car insurance or flights through comparison sites it still remains impossible to find the best deal for the right size trainers without opening multiple tabs and checking a myriad of retailers.
 
We’re trying to crack the three fundamental issues in online shopping. Product comparison, product discovery and a fair marketplace for brands and retailers. Unlike the closed shop of other platforms this is a win/win for shoppers and retailers and offers a huge, positive network effect.”
– Thomas J. Vosper, co-founder, aisle 3

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Stripe acquires TaxJar to add cloud-based, automated sales tax tools into its payments platform

Stripe, the privately-held payments company now valued at $95 billion, has made an acquisition to expand the range of tools (and services) that it provides to online businesses. It has acquired TaxJar, a popular provider of a cloud-based suite of tax services, which can be used to automatically calculate, report and file sales taxes.

One key point about TaxJar is that it works across a number of geographies and the many different sales tax regimes that each uses — a complex area for a lot of companies that do business online.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed but for some context the company was valued at $179 million post-money when it last raised money, in January 2019, according to PitchBook data.

Stripe has confirmed that all 200 employees of Woburn, MA-based TaxJar are joining the company.

Stripe will be integrating TaxJar technology into its revenue platform — where it will sit alongside Stripe Billing (its subscription tools) and Radar (its fraud prevention technology), and potentially build new services using AI and other technology to automate more functions — but businesses can continue to use TaxJar directly, too.

Launched in 2013, TaxJar today has around 23,000 customers. Stripe didn’t comment on how much of an overlap the two companies have in terms of users, but both have over the years gained a lot of traction with startups and other online businesses, which is likely one reason why TaxJar caught Stripe’s attention.

“There’s a reason TaxJar has been a top choice for businesses: their software tools make it incredibly easy to handle sales tax,” said Dhivya Suryadevara, Stripe’s CFO, in a statement. “With TaxJar, we will help millions of internet businesses running on Stripe with their sales tax and make it easier for them to sell internationally. And as a CFO, I’m delighted to welcome so many new colleagues who care deeply about tax calculation and reporting!”

When TaxJar last raised money — a $60 million round led by Rincon Venture Partners and Daher Capital in January 2019 — it said it had 15,000 customers, so that base has been growing (specifically, 53% in two years).

Stripe has actually made some moves in the area of tax before, buying Payable back in 2017 to help with 1099 reporting for customers who pay contractors and partnering with Intuit to help on-demand workers manage their finances. The TaxJar acquisition, however, is filling a noticeable gap in its native product set, as well as a pain point for its customers, specifically in the area of sales tax.

Stripe says that adding in sales tax collection and remittance — a complex system that covers as much as 11,000 tax jurisdictions in the U.S. alone — was one of the most-requested features among users, a fact that users themselves have lamented openly:

Every week I see someone from @stripe tweet “What should we build next for y’all?” and the #1 reply is always people screaming “US sales tax collection and remittance!”… then I watch OP respond to every *other* reply. It drives me insane.

— Justin Klemm (@justinklemm) January 21, 2021

Ironically, if you link through on the above Tweet, you’ll see in one thread, TaxJar comes up in the conversation.

Indeed, TaxJar was already “fully integrated” with Stripe as a partner, meaning businesses could use TaxJar to calculate and manage sales taxes on transactions powered by Stripe. But using the two together required logging into TaxJar, creating a separate account, and then getting a unique URL to paste into your Stripe Orders settings to run the services together: not the picture of simplicity that Stripe generally presents to users.

Some of that will now become smoother for Stripe customers as part of its bigger push for more automated tools to cover the more repetitive aspects of the online sales transactions process. (Other automated areas include algorithms around payment rejection, billing methods, and so on.)

“Like everyone at Stripe, we think every day about how we can help startups and multinational companies alike remove barriers to growing their business,” said Mark Faggiano, CEO and founder of TaxJar, in a statement. “And what that means is making the complicated work of sales tax compliance as straightforward as possible. We know that to grow the GDP of the internet, compliance is critical. We couldn’t be more excited to join Stripe and help power millions of businesses around the world.”

Stripe noted that the sorts of services that TaxJar covers includes providing accurate, localized sales tax rates at checkout, submitting tax returns to local jurisdictions and remitting the sales tax collected, producing itemized, local jurisdiction reports to show sales and sales tax collected, and suggesting the right product tax code based on a company’s products.

That TaxJar is coming into the deal with its own customer base and revenue model is important for another reason: it’s a sign of more diversification for Stripe — key as the $95 billion company continues to grow and inch potentially towards a public listing, now being considered for late 2021 or early 2022, according to rumors. Other signs of that diversification strategy include Stripe’s acquisition of Paystack last year out of Nigeria to help it break into payments in Africa, a deal it made for over $200 million.

(TaxJar’s SaaS pricing starts at $19/month and goes up from there, including an enterprise tier that will be handy for Stripe’s platform product.)

Stripe made revenues of $1.6 billion (or as much as $7.6 billion!… Stripe declined to comment on both numbers) in 2020, according to this profile in the WSJ, but it was also buffeted pretty significantly by the Covid-19 pandemic. Some sectors where Stripe has played strong, like travel, saw a big drop in transactions, while others, like e-commerce, saw a much bigger surge.

One takeaway from that might be: regardless of what our “new normal” will look like, it seems that e-commerce in one form or another will continue to grow, so offering a wider range of services, like automatic sales tax calculations and reporting, around its core business of payments will help Stripe grow revenues per user to offset the ups and downs of specific business lines when and if they arise again.

The area of tax-tech sits somewhere between e-commerce and fintech and has found its own steam in recent years, following both the growing size of the e-commerce market, and the evolution in fintech, where startups are building the complex processes that are not the core competency of their target customers and putting them into products that are easy to use and integrate. Others in the same space as TaxJar include Avalara, Vertx and Sovos among a wider field of startups.

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Mailchimp moves into e-commerce

Over the course of the last few years, Mailchimp morphed from a basic newsletter platform to a fully-fledged marketing company. And while the service already offered integrations with a number of e-commerce sites, it is now launching its own online stores for small and medium businesses, as well as a new appointment booking service.

These new services will be part of MailChimp’s new ‘Websites & Commerce’ plans, which starts with a free tier that offers most of the basic functionality. Users on the free plan will pay a 2% transaction fee. For $10/month, Mailchimp will remove its own branding and users will get access to email and chat support and only pay a 1.5% transaction fee, while those who opt for the ‘Plus’ plan at $29/month will only pay a 0.5% transaction fee per order.

All plans will let users build sites with unlimited pages and without bandwidth restrictions, and include SEO tools and integration with Google Analytics. As for the stores, users will be able to build their product catalogs and manage their orders, taxes and shipping configurations. All of this, as well as the appointments functionality, is obviously deeply integrated with the rest of the Mailchimp stack.

Image Credits: Mailchimp

These new plans are currently in beta and the new e-commerce features will become available to all Mailchimp customers in the U.S. and UK by May 18, while the appointments booking feature will go live for all users on April 27.

This addition of built-in commerce features marks a major step in Mailchimp’s evolution. But it also makes sense. The company says about 40% of its customers over fourteen million customers are in the commerce space already and many of them have been asking for more native commerce features. Almost 30% of its users are also using its existing commerce features and integrations and the company saw its revenue for e-commerce customers grow 61% from 2019 to 2020.

Since Mailchimp already offers websites, domains and other adjacent services, adding these new features feels like a natural next step, whether that’s selling directly from a Mailchimp store or taking appointment bookings for a service business.

The company stresses that while it is entering a new space, it is not walking away from its existing products and customers. “Rest assured, we’re not abandoning our smart marketing solutions,” Mailchimp CEO and co-founder Ben Chestnut writes in today’s announcement. “In fact, our goal is still to have the best email marketing in the world. We know our customers and partners demand consistency and continuity as much as they demand new features and functionality, so we’re refining and nurturing existing tools, too. We continue to work on making the process of designing emails as easy as possible, and in a few months we’re adding new beautiful email templates.”

Image Credits: Mailchimp

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Ushopal looks to charm China’s beauty lovers with niche Western brands

What will China’s answer to Estée Lauder look like in the digital age?

According to Ushopal, it will provide a seamless online and offline shopping experience, where China’s savvy beauty shoppers get to discover niche, tasteful brands and learn their stories.

Ushopal was founded in 2017 by J&J veteran Lu Guo as an “omni-channel” partner for luxury beauty brands at a time when online and offline consumption were increasingly merging in China. Unlike traditional import distributors, which simply puts goods on the shelves, Ushopal offers a holistic solution that helps brands develop their digital and brick-and-mortar retail channels as well as marketing content through its network of 2,500 influencers.

Ushopal felt that patnerships weren’t enough, so in 2019, it took a step further by adding a strategic investment arm to seek deeper operational influence on brands. Check sizes range from $10 million to $100 million, and for the larger rounds, Ushopal says it can leverage its own investors such as Cathay Capital, a private equity firm focused on global companies.

For instance, Cathay Capital bought a minority stake in the Paris-based, high-end fragrance brand Juliette Has A Gun. As its investor and partner, Ushopal helped the brand, which was founded by the grandson of the legendary couturier Nina Ricci, grow its gross merchandise value in China from zero to over 70 million yuan within a year.

To boost its capital pool, Ushopal raised $100 million in March that lifted its total fundings to $200 million. Aside from Cathay Capital, its past investors also include FountainVest Partners, a Chinese private equity firm that recently acquired the Canadian premium outdoor clothing label Arc’teryx, and Chinaccelerator, SOSV’s China-based accelerator focused on cross-border businesses.

Chinese consumers are hooked to e-commerce today, but there is still much of the shopping experience that Alibaba’s marketplace and WeChat mini-stores can’t offer. As such, Ushopal opened its first multi-brand store in an upscale mall in Shanghai last year, carrying brands that are normally found in Neiman Marcus in the U.S. and Le Bon Marché in Paris. The goal is to showcase treasures from around the world, an idea that is captured by the chain’s name — Bonnie&Clyde — the names of a Depression-era crime couple who is often depicted as chic and rebellious in popular culture.

Customers don’t pay at B&C’s brick-and-mortar store; instead, they order through its app and can have the order delivered to their doorsteps within four hours if they live in Shanghai. The delivery time is much shorter than China’s standard e-commerce import practice, which normally takes three to seven days for goods to arrive from their overseas distribution centers.

B&C, on the other hand, stockpiles in its own warehouse in a free trade zone in Shanghai, which allows for much quicker delivery. And since it holds exclusive and selective distribution rights to the brands it works with, it has a good grasp over how much inventory to keep.

A promotional short video made by Ushopal for Juliette Has A Gun in China

At China’s beauty stores targeting the mass market, shoppers are often seen moving from one busily stocked shelf to another while their eyes are fixated on their phones, browsing product reviews on content commerce apps like Xiaohongshu. B&C wants full attention from its customers by limiting its in-store product number and statinoing a team of beauty advisors. The demographics it targets are also quite different.

“When they are traveling in the U.S., they are going to Barneys, Saxs Fifth Avenue and whey they are in the U.K., they are going to Harrods,” Lau, vice president of brands at Ushopal, told TechCrunch in an interview. “They are familiar with the experience, and they are not here to line up.”

Last year, B&C generated over $200 million in gross merchandise value through the products it bought from a dozen of brands and subsequently sold in China. The average ticket size of its sales was over 5,000 yuan ($770), with shoppers often spending over 10,000 yuan per order, according to Lau. Many of the customers were what he called “second-generation rich,” roughly China’s equivalent to trust fund kids, as well as “well-to-do wives.”

Ushopal doesn’t limit its portfolio to overseas products. It doesn’t distinguish the origin of a brand, said Lau, whether it’s Chinese, Japanese or European. Though the company mainly works with Western brands at the moment, Lau said Chinese brands are becoming more sophisticated and often understand the local market better.

“For us, it’s just about creating great brands. It’s like Estée Lauder, which has brands from all over the world. We are a China-based company but a global luxury business.”

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Do your customers want fast and free delivery?

What do your customers want from delivery? Fast and Free is what we’ve all been told for for years but that’s not the case, join our webinar with GFS this Thursday the 29th of April at 11am to find out what your customers really want.

With the high street open again, customers once again have choice and if you don’t offer both the product and the delivery and returns experience that they demand then they won’t be shopping with you. On the plus side, if you figure out what your customer really want then 60% of them would buy from you again if they have a good delivery experience.

Research shows time and again that last-mile delivery options directly influence consumers’ decisions to purchase – and purchase again. Register now for Thursday’s webinar for a heft dose of reality and to discover how you can delivery a world class delivery and returns experience and bridge the gap between expectation and reality.

If you concentrate on one thing this year, it’s to recognise that the free ride ecommerce has had during the pandemic is over. When consumer had no choice but to buy online they did… and to be honest convenience for many wasn’t a problem as they were either working from home or on furlough at home. Now they’re out and about again, the pubs are serving drinks having opened in Scotland this week and in England for outside drinking in the sun earlier in the month. Your customer is no longer sitting at home happy for packages to turn up whenever they happen to arrive, now they want and demand service and if you excel then so will your business.

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How to utilise paid adverts to explore new international markets

Are you looking to use digital channels to make the most of opportunities for growth across global markets? If so, this webinar from DIT is for you, which will cover how to utilise paid adverts to explore new opportunities in international markets and how to connect with people who are already looking for your kinds of products or services on search engines.

In the second half of the session, DIT will look at what Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is and how it helps you achieve the fastest and most radical results. We will discuss which elements are important from a user experience perspective and what makes a good test, how to set one up, and what to do with the results.

This session will help you understand how you can increase conversions from paid adverts regardless of the amount of traffic coming to your website.

Join The Department for International Trade and Footprint Digital at 10am on the 20th of May to learn how to utilise paid adverts to explore new international markets and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) to turn visitors into customers.

The webinar will cover:

• How to get the most out of Google Ads (PPC)
• How to turn visitors into customers with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

To make the most of this webinar, you will ideally have previous online experience with either an existing marketplace or your own online site.

Your presenters will be Michael Scanlon, Head of PPC, and Josef James, Head of Content at Footprint Digital.

Department for International Trade and Footprint Digital Drop-In Series

This is the third in a series of “Digital Drop-In” events hosted by the Department for International Trade and delivered by Footprint Digital. Register to attend more events from this series.

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