OurPass, an e-commerce solutions provider, has closed a $1 million pre-seed investment to scale across the country and Africa at large.
Speaking on the inspiration behind the innovation, the Abuja-based startup’s founder and CEO, Samuel Eze, said:
“OurPass is entirely consumer-facing and invests heavily in its users’ privacy and data security. We don’t act as the merchants’ customers database, we just try to inject consumers faster and easier than they ever have; thereby increasing sales.
Merchants on the other hand, just need to sign up on our web platform, provide their KYC and install the OurPass checkout button for consumers to shop from them in one-click.”
Earlier this year, the company secured a pre-seed round of $1,000,000 led by Tekedia Capital, and angel investors from top Fortune 500 companies, including global financial services firms.
The secured investment will support the growth of OurPass’ ambitions to hire great talent and further develop its
technology.
OurPass allows users to quickly and seamlessly shop on their favorite online stores by reducing the checkout process to just one click.
OurPass rids customers’ shopping experiences of cumbersome checkouts, re-log-ins and long forms.
All customers have to do is sign up on the platform and enter their details (names, email and shipping addresses), then OurPass creates an identity for each customer and passes the identity across every online store they shop.
After the initial signup, customers do not need to fill out forms anymore, neither do they have to deal with re-logging issues.
Customers, however, need to download the application to shop and they can only shop with merchants that have the OurPass API connected to their platforms.
OurPass is built on a wallet system to augment its one-click unique selling proposition.
This is because cards could be tagged fraudulent if merchants and customers try checking out after purchase.
Users initially didn’t need to download an application in order to fill in their payment card details when completing their forms for the first time.
However, the need arose when there were cases of failed transactions and payment gateways constantly flagging customers’ cards.
This necessitated the adoption of a wallet strategy and the creation of an application for consumers.
Merchants and customers are now assigned virtual account numbers that are used in wallets which they will need to fund in order to checkout from stores.
Once the checkout is done, the money moves into the merchants’ wallets.
This helps the platform offer an instant settlement of payments (unlike other payment gateways) and capture end-to-end value.
OurPass charges 0.8% per transaction (capped at N1k for merchants), with a commission of 5% on every product sold, and it has done $500k in transaction value since its beta launch in May this year.
Over the months, OurPass has gathered a few merchants on its platform, and most of its clients comprise small businesses that use an online storefront provider that OurPass recently acquired called “Storemia”.
In addition to OurPass’ one-click checkout USP, it also offers customers free delivery on all orders.
To execute this front, it has partnered with logistics companies like Gokada and MAX.ng.
In the future, OurPass plans to partner with social commerce platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, and merchants on e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace and Magento.
It hopes to grow its team to up to 200 people before the end of next year and develop its technology while hoping its continuous growth will see it become the go-to platform for consumer checkout in Nigeria by 2023.
The company has also hinted at introducing subscriptions on its platform.
Featured Image: Rogas Mugisa, CGO, Co-Founder (Left); Gbeminiyi Laolu-Adewale, COO, Co-Founder (Middle); Samuel Chukwunonso Eze, CEO, Co-Founder (Right)
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