India’s Simpl raises $40 million for its buy now, pay later service

Bangalore-based fintech startup Simpl has raised $40 million as it looks to expand its online buy now, pay later service’s offerings in the world’s second largest market.

Valar Ventures and IA Ventures led the six-year-old startup’s Series B round. LFH Ventures and some existing investors also participated in the round, said the startup, which has raised $83 million to date.

Simpl partners with popular online brands and offers their customers the ability to make purchases without paying for them at that very moment.

Over the years, additionally, it has also developed a range of offerings including a one-time checkout feature; Bill Box, which allows customers to automate their recurring expense payouts, and splitting a bill in three parts, to build a “full-stack solution,” said Nitya Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Simpl, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Some of Simpl’s partners include telecom network JioPlatforms, food delivery Zomato, pharmacy 1MG, grocer BigBasket, and ticketing platform Makemytrip.

Buy now and pay later services have existed in India for several years, but have started to gain fast traction only in recent quarters as e-commerce and digital payments increase their reach in the country.

One of the factors that is making these services popular among consumers is the trust deficit that exists between them and the services with which they are engaging, said Sharma, pointing to continued popularity of cash as the payment method for e-commerce firms. (Fun fact: Uber introduced the ability to let users pay driver partners with cash for the first time in its existence months after launching in India.)

With a service like Simpl, customers know that they don’t have to pay right away and have the ability to dispute transactions and quickly request a refund, he said. The startup uses its own underwriting technology to determine the customers to whom it can offer its services, he said. For brands, too, an easier checkout process means the conversion increases significantly, he added.

“We built a fullstack checkout platform that gives merchants ultimate control of user experience and helps them build trust with consumers at checkout. Simpl is like a Khata or a Tab for online commerce. This intuitive user experience, built on the bedrock of trust, will enable a larger ecommerce market and will lead to greater adoption of mobile payments in India and the rest of the world,” he said.

The startup said it has grown its monthly active merchants and active user base by ten times in the past 18 months. Over 7,000 brands now use Simpl, the startup said. It now plans to work on further improving the consumer and merchants experience on its platform and also expand to new areas including bringing Simpl to offline neighborhood stores and building a loyalty program, said Sharma.

“India’s e-commerce market is at an inflection point and we believe Simpl’s solution is a key enabler in accelerating adoption of digital payments in e-commerce” said James Fitzgerald, Partner at Valar Ventures, in a statement. “It significantly improves consumer experience which is why it is quickly becoming a preferred partner for merchants.The team has shown great execution and we are excited to join their mission of democratizing e-commerce for all merchants big and small.”

Pay-later fintech players today finance loans worth $500 million each year, analysts at Bernstein wrote in a recent note to clients. They expect the figure to balloon to $26 billion by 2025.

India’s Slice becomes unicorn with $220M funding from Tiger Global, Insight Partners and Advent

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TechCrunch+ roundup: Jack leaves Twitter, Black Friday data, Nubank lowers IPO pricing

Jack Dorsey was Twitter’s first CEO — and also its fourth.

He led the platform from its launch in 2006 until he passed the torch to co-founder Ev Williams two years later. In 2015, Dorsey returned to the role after Dick Costolo’s stint, even though he was simultaneously serving as CEO of fintech platform Square.

Like many, I wondered how one person could adequately handle that level of responsibility. And apparently, so did Dorsey.

“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led,’” he wrote in a letter to employees.

“Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure. I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.”

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The Equity podcast team discussed his departure in a TechCrunch+ post yesterday afternoon:

• Alex Wilhelm: A call to return to the old normal from the new normal
• Natasha Mascarenhas: A reset would rewrite how VCs and entrepreneurs do business
• Amanda Silberling: Founders aren’t rock stars

It’s too early to say whether the move will alter the founder-led ethic that permeates Silicon Valley.

Personally, I’m hoping it starts a trend where mature tech companies do a better job of recognizing and rewarding employees who innately understand their culture, products and services. Case in point: Former CTO Parag Agrawal was initially hired as a software engineer, but a decade later, he’s leading Twitter’s 5,500 employees.

Perhaps it should be pro forma for corporate boards in search of a new CEO to start by talking to the company’s longtime engineers, product managers and marketing leads.

Thanks very much for reading,

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

3 views on Jack Dorsey’s decision to step down as Twitter’s CEO

Is Nubank’s lower IPO pricing bad news for Brazilian startups?

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Brazil-based Nubank initially indicated that it planned to raise a maximum of $3.66 billion in its upcoming IPO, but this morning, the Latin American neobank’s holding company lowered that to $2.86 billion.

This public offering was coming in hot; why throttle back now? In this morning’s edition of The Exchange, Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm unpack the numbers for the new proposed valuation and ask, “Does the revision matter?”

Is Nubank’s lower IPO pricing bad news for Brazilian startups?

Product-led growth and signal substitution syndrome: Bringing it all together

Image Credits: Halfdark (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Collecting data to optimize B2B marketing is notoriously difficult.

“Practitioners tend to see each new source of information about their potential buyers — each signal type — as a substitute for the last one that didn’t work,” according to Kerry Cunningham, senior principal at account engagement platform 6sense.

Embracing a product-led growth mindset allows organizations to look at users as signals, “just like form-fill leads, de-anonymized website traffic, visitors to your booth, and the rest,” says Cunningham.

Product-led growth and signal substitution syndrome: Bringing it all together

Black Friday data adds to evidence e-commerce growth is slowing

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

News of the omicron coronavirus variant may have suppressed retail activity over the Thanksgiving weekend, but what’s the explanation for flat online spending?

This year, Black Friday e-commerce totaled just $8.9 billion, compared to $9 billion in 2020.

“Perhaps we should not have been surprised,” writes Alex Wilhelm. “There were warning signs.”

Looking back at missed Q3 estimates from companies like Shopify, Amazon and Pinduoduo, “somewhat softer e-commerce numbers simply should not be a surprise,” he concludes.

Due to supply-chain concerns and ongoing pandemic restrictions, retailers say consumers started shopping earlier this year. Still, this is the first time we’ve seen a decrease in Black Friday spending.

“The pandemic gaveth, and now seems less inclined to continue to giveth, even if e-commerce itself is still growing,” writes Alex. “It’s just that it’s growing more slowly than investors expected.”

Black Friday data adds to evidence e-commerce growth is slowing

4 key strategies for succeeding at international expansion

Image Credits: twomeows (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

International expansion counts as one of every startup’s milestones, but the path to realizing your global ambitions “is riddled with obstacles,” writes angel investor Marjorie Radlo-Zandi.

Drawing from over 20 years of experience leading and expanding a food diagnostics company to more than 100 countries, Radlo-Zandi shares four core strategies for companies looking to enter foreign markets:

• Market research
• Prioritizing locations based on ROI
• Customizing deals and marketing
• Performance monitoring and contractual goals

4 key strategies for succeeding at international expansion

As human capital grows scarce, flexible compensation can help attract and retain talent

Image Credits: MirageC (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The pandemic-fueled labor shortage has many causes, but inflexible and inadequate compensation is one of the most discussed.

However, employees don’t always leave because of pay. “An opaque model for allocating compensation” is often to blame for employees feeling unheard and unseen, writes Compright CEO Boyd Davis.

Davis explains how startups can tackle this issue by analyzing employee and market data to come up with compensation strategies that are transparent, equitable and fair.

The pandemic taught us to be flexible and “embrace change and be open to adjusting processes, [which] holds true for compensation planning as well,” Davis writes.

As human capital grows scarce, flexible compensation can help attract and retain talent

Why SoundHound is valued at 5 Shazams

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Music recognition service SoundHound more or less disappeared about five years ago, so it was a surprise when its SPAC backer announced the company’s IPO at a valuation of $2.1 billion.

That, Anna Heim notes, is five times as much as Apple paid for Shazam, its biggest competitor.

SoundHound turned down the volume as it quietly developed a conversational AI product it now sells to a number of leading brands. “If its SPAC deck is to be believed, it seems it is just doing magic in plain sight,” writes Anna.

Why SoundHound is valued at 5 Shazams

Dear Sophie: How long does International Entrepreneur Parole take?

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

My co-founders and I think we might qualify for International Entrepreneur Parole.

How long does it take to get IEP approved? How does that compare to other options that are available to startup founders, and can my spouse work?

— Committed COO

Dear Sophie: How long does International Entrepreneur Parole take?

How Pilot convinced Index Ventures to think long-term about margins

Image Credits: twomeows (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Investors often get a bad rap for pushing companies to grow without burning too much cash, but according to Pilot CTO and founder Jessica McKellar, clear communication is key to soothing investor concerns.

In the latest episode of TechCrunch Live, McKellar and Index Ventures partner Mark Goldberg talked about their early tensions, and how communicating a clear road map helped the company deliver great customer experiences while giving a broad understanding of the long-term picture.

How Pilot convinced Index Ventures to think long-term about margins

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Cyber Week online spending down 1.4% to $33.9 billion as U.S. consumers shopped earlier this year

Consumer awareness of supply chain shortages and even earlier deals may have contributed to a slight decline in U.S. e-commerce sales during Cyber Week — the kickoff to the holiday shopping season that runs from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday. Last year, U.S. consumers spent a record $34.4 billion during Cyber Week, up 20.7% from the year prior. But this year, that figure dropped by 1.4% to $33.9 billion in online spend, according to data from Adobe’s Digital Economy Index.

Adobe’s analysis comes from data from over one trillion visits to U.S. e-commerce websites, which feature 100 million individual SKUs across 18 product categories, giving it a comprehensive window into holiday shopping trends.

The company noticed the declines this year starting on Black Friday. This year, retailers pulled in $8.9 billion in Black Friday online sales, down 1.3% from last year’s record of $9.03 billion — its first-ever year-over-year decline. Cyber Monday 2021 sales also dropped 1.4% year-over-year to $10.7 billion — just $100 million shy of what consumers spent last year, at $10.8 billion. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving Day online sales stayed flat at $5.1 billion.

These declines, while relatively small, represent a reverse in the usual trend of holiday shopping sales that jump up with every subsequent year. For an industry supposedly accelerated several years by the pandemic, according to reports from last year, it’s a notable demonstration of how the long-lasting impacts of the pandemic — which now include supply chain shortages — may have played out in consumers’ psyches. Worried about possible shortages, consumers may have shopped even earlier this year, Adobe says.

The data seems to back this up. During the month of November (Nov. 1 to Nov. 29), consumers spent $109.8 billion, a significant jump of 11.9% over last year. That means 22 days of the month have exceeded $3 billion in online spending, Adobe notes. This is a new record, as only 9 days in 2020 hit that same milestone. Plus, consumers may have shopped last month, as well, the company points out.

“With early deals in October, consumers were not waiting around for discounts on big shopping days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday,” said Taylor Schreiner, Director at Adobe Digital Insights, in an announcement about the Cyber Week findings. “This was further fueled by growing awareness of supply chain challenges and product availability. It spread out e-commerce spending across the months of October and November, putting us on track for a season that still will break online shopping records,” Schreiner added.

In other words, sales aren’t necessarily going to be down in 2021 overall, they’re just not going to be as concentrated as before. In fact, the pandemic may have may online shopping such a regular habit that now consumers are placing their holiday purchases alongside their usual activity, instead of waiting for a big Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales event as in years past.

Despite the declines, the peak holiday shopping period otherwise looked a lot like it would have otherwise. Cyber Monday shoppers went for the usual categories in greater numbers compared with September 2021 sales, across categories like toys (sales were up by nearly 11x the pre-season levels in Sept. 2021), gift cards (up by 7x), books (up by 7x), video games (up by 6x), and baby and toddler products (up by 6x). Appliances, including microwave ovens and small kitchen appliances, were also up 9.6x and 7.1x respectively, leading to the category’s increase of 5.6x.

Smartphone-driven sales were also up this year, with Cyber Monday smartphone-driven sales up 8.4% year-over-year, for example. This actually represents a change in course, however. Pre-pandemic, smartphone sales were expected to top 50% of online sales. But consumers now working from home may not need to shop from their phones as much as before, Adobe noted.

Although the shopping patterns look different, Adobe says it expects the overall holiday season to break a new record. It forecasts that consumers will drive 10% year-over-year growth in sales to hit $207 billion from November 1 through December 31.

 

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Pepper brings in $16M, gets back to its roots of spicing up ordering experience for food distributors

A majority of restaurants and grocery stores still order food from distributors via voicemail and pay with paper checks, without paper trails or the ability to access order history. Pepper wants to change that.

The New York-based company developed an ordering system specifically for food distributors that supports catalogues of over 100,000 items and enables these companies to launch mobile apps and websites so that they can accept orders and payments online. This method, on average, increased revenue for customers by 15%, company CEO Bowie Cheung told TechCrunch.

Cheung co-founded Pepper with Chetan Narain and Ivana Tesanovic in 2019. Cheung and Narain met at UberEats, where they saw technology infiltrate restaurants, yet not so much into the day-to-day workflows of the food distributors that worked with them.

“People care about food waste and sustainability, but it is difficult to envision any operational change when the industry is so fragmented,” Cheung said. “We watched how rapidly technology went from non-existent to prolific in restaurants. There are 25,000 food distributors in the U.S. and almost no technology built for them. That is a hole we can fill.”

Pepper, a platform for restaurants and suppliers, pivots to deliver food to consumers

In 2020 to address needs during the global pandemic, the company started Pepper Pantry, a consumer-facing portal for customers to place orders directly with food distributors and have them delivered to their homes.

Now today, Pepper announced $16 million in Series A funding to expand what it started two years ago as it aims to work with over 25,000 restaurants and grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Index Ventures led the round and was joined by Greylock Partners, Imaginary Ventures, BoxGroup, Moving Capital and Brett Schulman. The latest round brings the total capital raised to date to $20 million.

“Pepper is pursuing what we think is the next big opportunity in the restaurant industry: enabling restaurants to purchase $200 billion of annual food inventory digitally instead of via phone and email,” said Damir Becirovic, principal at Index Ventures, and Pepper investor, in a written statement. “Pepper has built a great platform that they provide to food distributors, essentially enabling a Shopify-like e-commerce storefront for them.”

The U.S. wholesale food distribution industry has a combined annual revenue of about $991 billion. To meet that demand, Cheung plans to inject the new funding into three areas: onboarding more food distributors in the U.S. and Canada, product development and sales and marketing. He also plans to double the size of Pepper’s 24 employees in the next 12 months.

Pepper prides itself on being low friction for customers to get up and running, in some cases without upfront costs, something Cheung said was not possible with some of Pepper’s competitors.

The company charges on a monthly basis based on the number of active users and can get customers going in about two months compared to hundreds of thousands of dollars in upfront costs and a six- to 12-month timeline from other companies, he added.

He believes that is why Pepper was able to recruit a network, in one year, that represents 20,000 unique buyers that bring in over $1 billion in sales altogether.

“For some supplies, that is enough friction, which is why they haven’t launched digital operations to date,” he added. “We can get our technology up quickly, so we don’t have to charge those fees. We also don’t charge ongoing consulting fees and are building out a library of features so customers can pick and choose what they need.”

Are rivals snacking on Instacart’s core grocery delivery market?

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Black Friday data adds to evidence e-commerce growth is slowing

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, e-commerce has been on a tear. Lockdowns, a move to remote work and other impacts of COVID pushed a great number of global citizens to spend more of their money online through e-commerce sites and on-demand services.

For companies like Shopify, the period since March 2020 has proven a bonanza. The Canadian e-commerce giant spent last March bouncing between $350 and $420 per share. Today, the company is worth $1,554.74 per share.

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Other players saw their businesses scale as consumers spent more time buying online and less time in stores. Instacart’s grocery delivery business accelerated. DoorDash went public on the back of a demand surge. Roblox usage skyrocketed, sending it to the public markets on a high. The list goes on.

But while some sectors did well, and many have continued to wow investors, the investor-thrilling run that e-commerce companies, in particular, has been on for five quarters could be slowing.

Black Friday and earnings warnings

While I despise astroturfed holidays that revolve around shopping, they can provide useful data points. You will not be shocked that Black Friday was a bit of a bust in terms of U.S. retail foot traffic. New COVID variants will do that, frankly.

But it may surprise you that online shopping as part of the Black Friday fauxliday fell compared to 2020 levels. Not that the declines were severe, but seeing online spending drift to $8.9 billion this year from $9.0 billion last year made me sit up and take note.

Perhaps we should not have been surprised. There were warning signs.

Shopify’s Q3 earnings, reported October 28, 2021, were a letdown. The company’s posted revenues of $1.12 billion missed estimates, despite posting 46% year-over-year growth. Earnings per share and gross merchandise volume also missed analyst guesses.

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eBay acquires the sneaker authentication business from partner Sneaker Con Digital

Online marketplace eBay is further investing in its sneaker business with today’s news that it’s acquiring Sneaker Con Digital’s authentication business, which verifies the authenticity of high-value footwear. The business has operations in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and Germany, and had been previously working with eBay to vet the sneakers being bought and sold on its platform.

Sneakers have become a large category on eBay’s marketplace, where today there are over 1.9 million pairs available to buy every day.

In October 2020, eBay launched an “Authenticity Guarantee” service in partnership with Sneaker Con, whose team of experts would verify the sneakers at no cost to sellers before items were shipped to the buyers. If the buyer then returns the sneakers, the authenticators would inspect them again before they’re sent back to the seller. This multi-point inspection system involves checking various aspects of the shoes in question, including the sizing, labels, stitching, logos, heel tabs, laces, and more, and even the box itself.

When the shoes were verified, the left sneaker is given an NFC-enabled tag that provides more detailed information about the sneakers’ authenticity when scanned. Verifiable listings also receive a blue check mark next to the item. The service was available for any sneaker over $100 being sold on eBay’s platform.

Many buyers and sellers preferred to shop sneakers through eBay as they’d be able to see photos of the exact shoes they’d be getting, instead of stock photos, and there were fewer fees compared with some rival sneaker marketplaces. Attracting this kind of buyer is also part of eBay’s larger strategy to drive enthusiasts to its site across various high-end categories, like handbags, watches, and sneakers, then benefit as they shop more items on eBay. The company recently noted the average sneaker buyer on eBay spends approximately $2,000 in other categories, for example.

Ebay says its Authenticity Guarantee service led to quarter-over-quarter category growth and, in just over a year, it’s authenticated over 1.55 million sneakers worldwide.

In its Q3 2021 earnings, eBay also noted its U.S. sneaker business was healthy and growing at double-digit rates, and it was expanding to other markets, including Germany. The company additionally announced plans to invest in 3D image capability on sneaker listings that would allow buyers to interact with a 360-degree view of the item they’re purchasing, as another means of instilling buyer confidence.

With the acquisition, eBay is bringing its partnered authentication business in-house where it will continue to build on its offerings to accommodate resale market trends, the company said about today’s news. Deal terms were not disclosed.

However, the deal is only for Sneaker Con’s authentication business — its events business will continue to operate separately. The deal was signed and closed on November 24, 2021, notes eBay.

“eBay has always been a vibrant community of enthusiasts, with deeply knowledgeable buyers, sellers and employees,” said Jordan Sweetnam, SVP and General Manager of eBay North America, in a statement. “We partnered with Sneaker Con to launch sneaker authentication on eBay last year because the team shared our passion for the category – with best-in-class capabilities to deliver what our customers want most. The response to our authentication offering has been overwhelming, and this acquisition allows us to continue to transform eBay and bring a higher level of trust and confidence to every transaction,” he added.

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Particular Audience takes in $7.5M to give retailers way to take on Amazon

Being in control of customer data is one of the ways retailers, like Amazon, Spotify and Netflix, are able to tap into consumer behavior and create customized experiences whenever a user logs in.

Those are some of the reasons Amazon, in particular, is poised to grab 50% of the U.S. e-commerce market this year, and why Sydney-based Particular Audience wants to break down the data silos going on within e-commerce to give any retailer a chance to gather similar data on their customers to personalize experiences.

Particular Audience provides product discovery tools for retailers that are powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. In fact, the company wants to go further and offer personalization based on anonymity and without compromising personal data, CEO James Taylor told TechCrunch.

Taylor launched Particular Audience in 2019 after taking a few years to work out the technology. The global pandemic threw a wrench in some plans, with Taylor and a handful of executives taking a pay cut so as to not have to let any employees go. However, with the e-commerce industry growing over the past 18 months, the company was able to get back to where it was, he said.

Getting started with building an audience in the creator economy

The company has now amassed a real-time data set on product search, sales, pricing and availability from across the internet, from its browser plugin SimilarInc.com, which gathers the data from its online shopper community without tracking or cookies. Retailers can analyze that data to tell them, for example, how better to promote high-margin or overstocked items.

“Data IP is the current frontier,” he said. “It is data that is going to improve predictions to personalize inventory and reduce waste while also helping with supply chain management. The goal is to create website data visibility that would benefit all of the other merchants other than Amazon.”

To continue developing its technology, the company secured $7.5 million in Series A funding in a round led by Equity Venture Partners and that included existing investors Carthona Capital and a group of angel investors. This latest investment gives the company $9.5 million in total funding raised to date, which includes $1.3 million in seed funding raised in 2019.

How Particular Audience works on a website. Image Credits: Particular Audience

Particular Audience is working with approximately 100 websites currently. In addition to Sydney, the company also has an office in London. Europe makes up more than 50% of Particular Audience’s global revenue, and the new funding enables the company to open a new office in Amsterdam next year.

North America is also a growth territory for the company, where it has already opened an office in Vancouver, with plans to open a New York office in 2022 as well. The company has 60 employees, up from 20 last year, and Taylor expects to add 40 more in the next year, including rounding out its leadership team with a head of product.

The funding will also be invested into building out an API-first product suite and retail media platform so retailers can gain a revenue stream from cost per clicks. Meanwhile, the company saw 460% year over year in revenue growth and expects to hit $100 million in gross merchandise value through its products this year, up 19 times in the last two years, Taylor said.

As part of the investment, Daniel Szekely, partner at Equity Venture Partners, will join the board.

“Personalization of the internet is a critical frontier for e-commerce retailers, and in a world of growing online shopping options and diminishing consumer attention spans, delivering an experience that meets individual consumers’ needs is absolutely critical,” he said in a written statement. “James and his outstanding team have tackled this issue in a novel way, and the important need for their solution has been made obvious as the business gets pulled into multiple geographies. We’re thrilled to back them in their Series A and know this is just the beginning of the journey.”

Demand Curve: How Zapier acquires customers via its homepage

 

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Bolt makes first acquisition with Tipser, launches ‘Remote Checkout’

The ability to purchase something at the point of discovery from digital content exists, but checkout technology company Bolt has the opportunity to give that its “one-click” treatment. It announced Monday that it made its first acquisition in Tipser, a Swedish-based technology company enabling direct checkout on any digital surface.

San Francisco-based Bolt is fresh off of raising $393 million in Series D funding in October, bringing total capital raised to date to $600 million. And though the Tipser acquisition is in line with the company’s plans of what it wanted to do with the new capital, Ryan Breslow, founder and CEO of Bolt, told TechCrunch the deal “had been in the works for a while.”

Tipser’s technology enables consumers to purchase products natively from sites like online publications, mobile marketplaces, price comparison sites, social media platforms or search engines. The company is led by Marcus Jacobsson, co-founder and CEO, who started the company in 2012 with Axel Wolrath and Jonas Sjöstedt.

In fact, when Bolt initially began talking to Tipser, the company was not in a place to sell, and was actually working on their next investment round (they raised just over $14 million), but the two companies ended up going into deeper conversations and found their cultural resonances worked better together, Breslow said.

“We saw how significant Tipser could be for Bolt,” he added. “They had been perfecting their embedded commerce technology for a decade and were the only formidable player. They were stronger than us in areas where we were weaker. It is very strategic to have them on our team.”

As 2020 ends, new unicorn formation continues to impress

Exact transaction figures were not disclosed, but Breslow did reveal to TechCrunch that the acquisition, which was an all-stock deal, came in “just shy of $200 million.” The entire Tipser team is staying put, so Bolt will be adding 100 more people to its team. Tipser’s presence in Sweden will now also serve as Bolt’s European headquarters to go with the company’s recent announcement of expanding into Europe.

In addition to the acquisition, Bolt is launching Remote Checkout, a tool for shoppers to make a purchase from the exact point of discovery. Instead of seeing something on social media — where 84% of shoppers look for reviews, according to Pew Research Center — then going to another website to make the purchase,

The new tool is one that Bolt was working on internally for over a year and was inspired by Instagram Checkout, also a tool where you can discover a product and check out directly from the app, Breslow said.

“With the death of tracking and cookies, we could see the need for native checkout so retailers can track conversion,” he added. “It’s better for consumers to not have to click a million things.”

Bolt’s Remote Checkout features include the direct one-click checkout, engagement with Bolt’s network of shoppers and the ability for merchants to boost conversion rates while receiving orders through multiple channels and building direct relationships with visitors. It also turns anonymous visitors into logged-in account holders and monetizes traffic on-site.

The added feature of publishers and creators being able to monetize traffic coming to their sites was one that Jason Wagenheim, president and CRO at media publisher BDG (formerly known as Bustle Digital Group), found particularly interesting. BDG’s brands include Bustle, EliteDaily and Fatherly.

He was a bystander of sorts for the merger, having signed up with Tipser in January as the company’s first U.S. publisher, going live with the product in April on two of BDG’s 13 sites, Wagenheim said in an interview.

“What I love most about this acquisition is that we can accelerate the onboarding of hundreds of more merchants onto our platform,” he said. “This is a marriage of content and commerce.”

Before social media and companies like Bolt and Tipser, shopping directly from a magazine page meant utilizing QR codes, but that didn’t take off like people thought it would, Wagenheim said.

Other publishers tried to crack the code, and he noted Goop being one of the few able to do it. Now with these new technologies, any publisher or creator can close the gap between the upper and lower funnels and drive awareness because its commerce is shoppable and one click away.

He considers BDG’s project with Tipser still in the beta phase, but there are plans to roll out the technology on all of its sites next year. The company already had its audience engage in over 25 million sessions with people, on average, seeing 10 products per session, a metric Wagenheim says means the process is working: people are spending time with the products, are engaged and adding products to carts.

“With hundreds more merchants for editors to write about, and the one-click transaction happening, that is a game-changer,” he added.

Checkout is the key to frictionless B2B e-commerce

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Scurri research: UK retailers seriously concerned about festive season

Scurri, the software provider that connects and optimises the ecommerce ordering, shipping, and delivery process has released the results of its nationwide representative B2B survey among 350 retailers across the entire UK. The findings reveal the level of key concern felt by retailers leading up to the festive season. The study also looked at how supply chain complications have caused changes in online retailers’ key growth markets and their feelings going into the New Year (2022).

“Supply chain disruption is at a crisis point. HGV driver and CO2 shortages, inflated shipping costs and commodities prices, sustainability issues, financial strains and greater ESG regulations for sourcing and manufacturing goods are just some of the many challenges retailers are facing. As we approach one of the busiest shopping periods of the year, it’s therefore critical for retailers to reflect on how they can respond to their concerns through their own campaigns and strategies. Retailers have no choice but to turn this disruption on its head by kickstarting Christmas marketing earlier than usual to keep customers happy.”
– Rory O’Connor, founder and CEO, Scurri

HGV driver and staffing shortages at a crisis point, Northern Ireland Protocol and resulting complications among main retailers’ concerns

With more than 9 out of 10 online retailers saying they are concerned or very concerned (93%) about labour shortage and supply chain issues ahead of the festive season, only as little as 7% of retailers say they are not really concerned.

The greatest cause of supply chain issues during this time are felt to be driver and staffing shortages (22%), the Northern Ireland Protocol and resulting complications (21%), China’s factory slowdown (20%), continuing COVID-19 complications (19%) and Brexit (17%).
As a result, many retailers are experiencing consequences in the form of half-empty shelves in their stores and major shortages. In addition, retailers are concerned about the golden quarter, saying pent-up shipping demand will continue to impact product availability.

“Add inflated shipping costs and commodities into the mix – alongside the possibility of greater environmental, social and governance regulations for sourcing and manufacturing goods – and it is clear retailers face great turbulence. The only way to get out of firefight mode is to really accelerate digital transformation and improve supply chain visibility. Putting data at the heart of supply chain resilience allows a company to orchestrate disruption and constraints of the supply and demand.”
– Rory O’Connor, founder and CEO, Scurri

Increased prices and additional hiring of staff before the shopping bonanza will start

Additionally, in order to combat these shortages and worries, online retailers have hiked up their prices, with only 4% of retailers having no plans to change them. Over 95% of online retailers have or will increase their prices – 73% having already increased their prices and 22% not yet having increased their prices but with plans to do so shortly.

Additionally, retailers are planning to hire more temporary staff this year than previously to ensure the stocking of shelves and a smoother flow of operations. Only 2% of retailers said that they did not have plans to hire any additional staff, while almost three quarters of retailers have already begun this hiring process (74%).

Looking to the future – shifting of priorities for online retailers

When it comes to looking to the future, UK online retailers are confident about what is in store for 2022. While concerns regarding the supply chain and resulting complications may still prevail, 84% say that they are optimistic about the new year. Things have changed however, and priorities for online retailers have shifted:

• 46% of retailers said advancing their sustainability agenda to reduce impact on the planet is their priority. The majority of British consumers pay attention to the sustainability and environmental efforts of retail brands, with customers searching for more sustainable retail brands online.
• Other top priorities include investing in digital retail technology (46%), cross border expansion (44%), Covid-19 recovery and return to pre-covid levels of business (42%), as well as winning new business (41%).

Alteration of key growth markets

Additionally, 88% of the surveyed retailers (308 out of 350) had to alter their key growth markets as a result of recent events, with the most popular areas now being Germany (38%), followed by France (30%), Belgium (29%), The Netherlands (28%) and Ireland (27%). For those retailers who did not alter their key markets, the most popular regions that they continue to focus on are much the same as retailers who refocused, including Germany (33%), Switzerland (33%), The Netherlands (29%), France (29%) and Ireland (26%).

While the strong majority of online retailers remain optimistic for the coming year, there are still worries. 86% of retailers state they are concerned over labour shortage and supply chain issues affecting beyond early 2022. Overall it is fair to say that when looking past this busy retail season and into the near future, there is a sense of cautious optimism by retailers.

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Record breaking $2.9 billion in Shopify Black Friday sales

Shopify have announced a record breaking Black Friday with sales of nearly $2.9 billion from independent and direct-to-consumer businesses worldwide, representing a 21% increase over Black Friday in 2020.

Together, merchants on Shopify generated peak sales of nearly $3.1 million per minute at 12:02 PM EST on Black Friday, and merchants crossed $1 billion in sales by 4:00am EST, four hours earlier than Black Friday in 2020.

Record breaking Black Friday Global Highlights

• >Peak sales per minute: Nearly $3.1 million on Black Friday at 12:02 PM EST.

• Top selling countries & cities where shoppers made purchases from: United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, with the top-selling cities on Black Friday including London, New York, and Los Angeles.

• Mobile sales: 72% of sales were made on mobile devices versus 28% on desktop, an increase from 67% of sales made on mobile and 33% on desktop in 2020.

• Top product categories: Apparel and accessories followed by health & beauty and home & garden.

• Average cart price: $101.20 USD, which is up from last year’s Black Friday average of $90.70 USD.

• Cross-border orders worldwide: 15% on Black Friday as a percentage of total orders, with the most popular cross-border routes being United States-Canada, Canada-United States, and United Kingdom-United States.

• 23,000+ tonnes of carbon removal: funded to counteract emissions from the delivery of every order placed on Shopify’s platform on Black Friday. Learn more about how Shopify is eliminating the climate impact of merchant shipments here.

You can visit datastories.shopify.com to view Shopify’s annual Black Friday / Cyber Monday Live Globe, which captures global commerce in real-time and demonstrates the impact of Shopify merchants globally.

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Tamebay Black Friday Speed Test 2021

The annual Tamebay 2021 Black Friday Speed Test is underway. To test the resilience of deliveries over the Black Friday period, at 9.30am this morning we placed 15 orders split across the largest three UK general marketplaces – Amazon, eBay and OnBuy, and will be reporting back on the delivery experience.

We already know that this year is challenging for carriers – in Royal Mail’s last Quality of Service report they disclosed that only 82.4% of 1st Class mail was delivered on time. Their target is 93.0% of deliveries to be on time.

Today is also the busiest day of the year for retailers and it’s interesting to check their despatch times which is the only part of the process they are able to control. It’s likely that some parcels will actually get despatched today, but those marked as despatched over the next two days might in reality not enter the carrier networks until Monday.

Having created a list of items to buy, ranging from Home, DIY, Shoes, Christmas, and Entertainment categories, as we made each purchase we accepted the default delivery times offered by each retailer on the marketplace.

Amazon may have an unfair advantage as three of the purchases turned out to be regular FBA and they are normally ferociously fast to deliver. However one purchase is being shipped direct from the retailer and it turns out another is from the Amazon Global Store – this means Amazon US will make a local purchase from a US merchant and ship the product to the UK taking care of any taxes and duties before making a domestic delivery to me. Even the FBA orders are not promising the accustomed next day delivery so Amazon are playing it safe.

We also inadvertently purchased an item on eBay from a seller based in Wuhan China, with an estimated delivery date of Wed 15 Dec – Tue 1 Feb. That’s quite a wide range and may mean we don’t actually finalise the results this year!

Interestingly all five orders placed on OnBuy had the same “Standard (Free)” delivery service offered but we’ll update the table with the actual carrier used as the results come in. OnBuy win the prize for the fastest despatch with one order having already been marked as shipped while I was writing this post!

We’ll report back regularly on the Black Friday Speed Test 2021 results and are looking to beat the statistics from last year where, on average, the 15 parcels arrived 0.267 days earlier than the earliest estimated delivery date. We aren’t so interested in who can deliver fastest or who can despatch the quickest – what matters is whether the entire ecommerce operation is running smoothly and whether marketplaces, retailers and carriers can work together to keep the delivery promises that have been made – if they match or get close to delivery estimates on Black Friday, we can be pretty confident that they will cope over the whole of the Christmas period.

Black Friday Speed Test 2021 Purchases

Marketplace	Advertised Service	Estimated Delivery	Delivery Cost	Despatch Date	Delivery Date	+/- Estimate
Amazon	Royal Mail 48 Tracked	Thu 2 Dec – Fri 3 Dec	Free
Amazon	Amazon FBA	Thu 2nd Dec	Prime Account
Amazon	Amazon FBA	Thu 2nd Dec	Prime Account
Amazon	Amazon FBA	Fri 3 Dec – Tue 7 Dec	Prime Account
Amazon	Amazon FBA	Thu 9 Dec	Prime Account
eBay	Royal Mail 2nd Class	Sat 4 Dec	£1.39
eBay	Royal Mail 2nd Class	Tue 30 Nov	Free
eBay	Royal Mail 2nd Class	Wed 1 Dec	Free
eBay	Other courier (3 to 5 days)	Tue 30 Nov – Thu 2 Dec	£3.60
eBay	Economy Delivery from outside UK	Wed 15 Dec – Tue 1 Feb	£1.95
OnBuy	Standard (Free)	Fri 3 – Mon 6 Dec	Free
OnBuy	Standard (Free)	Wed 1 Dec – Thu 2 Dec	Free
OnBuy	Standard (Free)	Thu 2 Dec – Fri 3 Dec	Free
OnBuy	Standard (Free)	Thu 2 Dec – Fri 3 Dec	Free
OnBuy	Standard (Free)	Tue 30 Nov – Wed 1st Dec	Free	Fri 26 Nov

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Brits start Christmas shopping early fearing supply chain & cross-border issues

Brits are Christmas shopping early this year, as consumers brace themselves for a winter of delivery delays and border hold-ups, according to new research from Avalara, as they publish their Holiday Readiness Guide.

Just over half (51%) of British shoppers are planning to start their Christmas shopping early – actually pre-December – this year, with an incredible 19% of eager elves starting before November. The lure of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales has captured shoppers’ attention this year, with 18% opting to start filling their baskets during the sales window compared to just 11% last year.

Those who have moved their holiday shopping window to earlier in the year cited concerns over delivery delays due to the supply chain crisis as their primary reason for the shift (34%), followed by worries over delays to cross-border delivered over Brexit customs issues (28%), and fears that a second wave of Covid lockdowns or restrictions could have an impact (26%).

Yet despite these concerns, Brits are unwilling to throw money at the problem to secure their deliveries. Over a third (38%) of consumers admitted that they had abandoned a delivery after finding out there was a customs fee to pay, half (50%) said they wouldn’t be prepared to spend anything on additional customs charges for goods, and only 1 in 5 would be willing to pay almost any customs excess in order to ensure Santa delivered their gifts on time for Christmas morning.

“Though this holiday season is set to be one of the busiest on record for many sellers, there’s a lot of nervousness about the external headwinds that might impact the festive season. From supply chain issues, to cross-border delivery days, and the fear of further Covid restrictions, retailers and shoppers need to plan ahead. For sellers, that means getting the essentials like your tax obligations in order early. As for shoppers, it’s worth making your wish list early to ensure Santa can deliver your goods in time for Christmas morning.”
– Alex Baulf, Senior Director, Global Indirect Tax, Avalara

As shopping across multiple channels expands, consumer expectations evolve, and new indirect tax regulations are passed, a retailer’s ability to maintain international tax compliance becomes more complicated. To help retailers and tax teams navigate these pressures, download Avalara’s Holiday Readiness Guide, designed to help businesses get their omnichannel indirect tax strategies in place so they can take advantage of the holiday shopping season boom.

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Black Friday challenges faced by retailers

Mark Elward, CCO of Huboo, shares a preview of what retailers and ecommerce merchants can expect from Black Friday challenges:

As a fulfilment technology provider with 1,400 clients across the UK, Netherlands and Spain, our customers are taking a mixed approach to Black Friday, bespoke to their business model and demands. It’s not sector specific – a myriad of factors come into play when deciding which sales occasions should be brought to fruition – but I expect supply issues will play a large part in that process.

Sales spikes are diluted in the digital age as a result of online voucher codes and social media promotions, as well as the sheer volume of sales occasions dotted throughout the year. Retailers traditionally structured discounts around three or four key seasonal sales periods, but that model is long gone. However, large players like Next and M&S are shunning Black Friday this year. Next, in particular, still places huge emphasis on its very popular Boxing Day sale which allows it to enjoy a Christmas sales peak throughout December, followed by another rush as the year ends.

Supply chain and labour shortages In short will both have a significant impact on Black Friday sales this year. For UK retailers and ecommerce businesses importing goods from China, real challenges are still at play. Ocean freight charges are currently around five times higher, so what was costing around $3,000 is now more like $15,000. It’s no surprise then that the increase will have to be passed on to the consumer and delays can be expected due to the weakened supply chain.

The other issue we’re seeing is that haulage firms are still facing staff shortages, which are continuing to pose huge problems. In the worst case scenario, trailers of stock are left waiting to be collected meaning next day deliveries are returning to luxury status as opposed to what had become the norm. Lastly, product offerings are reduced so choice will be less than in previous years, much like the way consumers are now frustratingly au fait with at grocery stores.

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Rensource-spinoff Sabi closes $6M bridge round, expands B2B retail platform outside Nigeria

Nigeria’s informal trade sector, worth over $244 billion, has more than 40 million micro, small and medium businesses.

Most of these businesses operated offline until a few years ago when startups brought about digitization by providing infrastructure and a gamut of e-commerce and financial services.

One-year-old Sabi — a spinoff from Rensource, an African energy company that offers power-as-a-service to customers — is the latest startup to raise funds to serve the informal sector. The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised a $6 million bridge round led by pan-African VC firm CRE Ventures.

Sabi’s bridge round is coming a year after closing a $2 million seed round from CRE Ventures, Jaango Capital, Atlantica Ventures and Waarde Capital.

Ademola Adesina and Anu Adasolum have been at the helm of Rensource since the company started in 2015; Adesina as founder and CEO and Adasolum, COO.

By providing these small and medium businesses with power, the team at Rensource began to look into other pain points these SMEs had and find ways to add value beyond energy provision.

With the pandemic halting Rensource’s business, the team had time to develop this concept which became Sabi in October 2020.

Adasolum leads Sabi’s efforts as founder and CEO following the company’s branch out in March, while Adesina holds a co-founder and director role. 

Nigeria’s Rensource raises $20M to power African markets by solar

Sabi is an attempt at platforming the informal sector and African trade via various online and offline channels. This means that Sabi tries to complement the middlemen (mainly distributors) in the B2B e-commerce retail chain rather than replace them, a model familiar with other prominent B2B e-commerce retail startups such as Sokowatch, MaxAB TradeDepot and Twiga.

“We’re not trying to be, you know, a tech-enabled digital distributor. We’re not trying to disintermediate a market full of hyper-specialization where one of the defining characteristics of the informal sector is you have all these middlemen and agents performing a very narrow role,” Adesina said to TechCrunch.

“We think that specialization is important for the sector to work properly — whether it’s aggregation, making a sale, knowing the customer especially well, all these middlemen play a key role. And the way we deal with them is we give them a set of tools and an infrastructure they can run their business on to make it more optimized.”

Sabi caters to the needs of manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers and classifies all of them as merchants.

The company operates an asset-light model and doesn’t own vehicles, warehouses or goods. But it provides visibility into these assets across the entire value chain from the demand and supply side and controls on a single platform.

Running this model exempts Sabi from the constraints a typical B2B e-commerce retail platform might face when acting as a distributor for manufacturers to retailers.

Anu Adasolum (Founder and CEO, Sabi)

For instance, asset-heavy platforms can’t move goods from two different suppliers in the same truck or use the same salespeople when distributing goods from different suppliers to retailers. On the other hand, Sabi doesn’t have such constraints, so whereas other platforms try to standardize operations around goods offtake, Sabi concentrates on offtake monitoring.

“We focus our processes, policies and monitoring around understanding the different types of users and monitoring how the third parties we work with are serving them,” said CEO Adasolum.

“As a result, the net experience of each off-taker is different and it works more for their particular business type. So I’m not going to go to a business that is used to working a particular way and change it but instead offer several other channels that they’re more comfortable with through our platform.”

These channels include offline agents, call centres, merchant partners, supplier centres and mobile app. Each stakeholder can access tools around inventory management, sales, tracking, digital invoices, analytics on the platform.

“We’re starting with what makes them comfortable, not what we think is best,” the CEO added. 

Merchants on Sabi deal with FMCG goods and products in other sectors such as agriculture, electronics and chemicals. The category-agnostic platform is home to more than 175,000 merchants who have made B2B transactions totalling over $200 million annualized GMV run rate. And more than 10,000 agents serve these merchants on Sabi’s network.

Sabi makes money by taking a transaction fee when any merchants perform any sale on the marketplace. The company also earns a margin for providing financing to them.

Adesina said in Q1 2022, Sabi plans to roll out a subscription model where agents will pay a monthly fee to access a reseller model.

Also in Sabi’s pipeline is providing manufacturers with visibility and data-backed insights and direct engagement down the value chain.

Growing an average of 40% month on month in Nigeria, Sabi intends to replicate its rapid growth in other African countries Kenya and South Africa.

The company opened shop in Kenya last month and just made a few hires in South Africa, intending to go live early next year. Another round of funding, a Series A, might close in time to fuel the company’s expansion into both countries, Adesina said.

Pardon Makumbe, co-founder and managing partner of CRE Venture Capital, in a statement emphasizing why his firm doubled down on its investment under a year said, “Sabi’s online and offline approach to serving informal businesses, combined with the quality of its platform and service provider curation, has clearly taken root in Nigeria. The company is on track to be one of the fastest-growing African companies of 2021 and is showing no signs of slowing down.”

Sabi’s growth, in addition to market demand, comes from the background of its founders. Before Sabi and Rensource, CEO Adasolum worked at Jumia, where she was in charge of offline sales for some African countries: Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya.

She has also performed commercial operations and merchant acquisition roles for the African e-commerce giant. Adesina too has vast experience working with multinationals such as the Capricorn Investment Group, the Rockefeller Foundation and JP Morgan.

Adesina is confident that the digitization of offline processes for B2B e-commerce retail will continue despite questions about why many players exist in the space. And he believes as more startups come into the market, more venture capital will follow.

Sabi’s monthly GMV numbers is one reason the co-founder has this conviction. Right now, the company claims to be on the verge of processing about $12 million monthly GMV.

While Jumia, Africa’s biggest e-commerce player, records this volume on average after five years in operation, it has taken Sabi less than a year to achieve this feat which can be attributed to the size of the country’s informal B2B e-commerce retail market.

“The kind of data we’re seeing now in terms of like real-time visibility into whether people like this product or that product, that stuff is gonna accrue and grow exponentially over the next a few years,” the co-founder said.

“And then I think that the same way one saw in China in the late 90s the kind of hyper digitalization of what was a very informal economy, I see that happening faster in Africa than most people realize. I think it’s something people don’t realize how quickly it’s going to happen.”

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