Sitting in Athens during the first COVID-19 lockdown, entrepreneur Rania Lamprou watched online e-commerce exploding because of social distancing. But merchants still struggled with low conversion rates because their checkout processes were complicated, and they had to integrate multiple providers for payments, shipping, and loyalty programs.
“I knew there had to be a better way to reduce friction for both merchants and customers,” Lamprou told TechCrunch. So, she thought, why not turn the checkout process into a “checkout-as-a-service” platform that streamlined it for both merchants and shoppers? She started coding in Python.
But, she wasn’t alone. Tech giants Shop Pay and Bolt were in the same space, but were focusing on the U.S. market. Europe was less of a focus. Shop Pay, for example, had started back in 2014 and has now raised a total of $982.1 million. So what was Lamprou going to do with her tiny startup, which she’d named Simpler?
She brought on two friends she’d known from university, Alex Kyriakopoulos and Spyros Mandekis, started building the team, and they raised their first $1 million pre-seed round.
Today, Simpler has over 250 merchants, more than half-a-million registered shoppers, and expects to increase its revenue by 10 times by the end of 2025, said Lamprou. It recently also raised €9 million (about $10 million) in a pre-Series A round to double down in the U.K., Italy and Spain. Participating in the round were VentureFriends, MMC Ventures and Lamda Development.
“Yes, Bolt is a big, massive company, but they are focused on the U.S., mostly with handling fraud problems, like chargebacks. That is a very big problem in the U.S., but it’s not so much in Europe,” she said.
In Europe, she said, there are different issues: “We have to localize and add all these different solutions, different providers. Every country has different needs, customer preferences, different payment providers, loyalty coupons, etc.”
That’s important because European e-commerce sales increased 66% from 2019 to 2021. Despite a temporary decline, the market is expected to keep growing, potentially reaching $955 billion by 2028.
The solution turned out to be elegant.
On Simpler, merchants can outsource payments, shipping and loyalty programs into one system, which, the company says, boosts conversions and reduces complexity. For shoppers, it means a one-click buying experience across multiple stores and channels.
“We’re seeing strong demand from both SMEs and enterprise-level businesses,” she said.
While Shop Pay is exclusive to Shopify, Simpler is designed for all platforms. And, unlike Bolt, which focuses heavily on the U.S. market, Simpler is targeting the U.K. and Europe.
“We’ve built a robust end-to-end solution with three orders of magnitude less funding than Bolt,” she added.