LAGOS (The Southern African Times) – A Nigerian tech firm, OurPass, has closed a $1m pre-seed round led by Tekedia Capital and angel investors from Fortune 500 companies.
OurPass is a mobile application that enables consumers to shop with one click. The first-time consumers sign up on the OurPass platform, they enter their names, email and shipping addresses, after which they get an identity for each customer, which is passed across every online store they shop.
The company hopes to use this round of fund to develop its technology and grow its team to up to 200 people before the end of 2022
According to TechCrunch, the Chief Executive Officer, Samuel Eze, said, “I watched my mother struggle to shop online where I saw her set up multiple accounts on different platforms while going through a rigorous checkout process.
“In many cases, she ended up dropping the card and moving on to a different online store. Seeing the same pattern happen with other friends and family, I had to dive into it and found that it was actually a major headache for consumers and online retailers.”
OurPass customers do not need to fill out any form and do not have to deal with re-logging issues. But they can only shop with merchants that have OurPass API linked to their platforms.
The company said it found out that checkout was a major issue for merchants, adding that about 75 per cent of shopping carts got abandoned yearly due to cumbersome checkout experiences.
“We did not want to defeat our USP of one-click checkout by allowing consumers to try to check out in one-click only for them to see their cards flagged as fraudulent. Hence, the reason why we had to build our system on a wallet system to enable that one-click checkout,” Eze added.
The company said it gathered a few merchants on its platform, with most of its clients being small businesses using Storemia, an online storefront provider it acquired recently.
It said it had plans to work with merchants on e-commerce platforms in the future, including WooCommerce, Magento, Squarespace and Shopify, and social commerce platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
OurPass said it had done $500,000 in transaction value since beta launching in May this year, adding that it hoped to become the go-to platform for consumer checkout in Nigeria by 2023.
