Entrepreneur Rania Lamplugh sat in Athens during the first COVID-19 lockdown and watched as social distancing led to an explosion of online e-commerce. But retailers still struggled with low conversion rates because of complicated checkout processes and the need 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,” Lamplugh told TechCrunch. So she wondered what would turn the checkout process into a “checkout-as-a-service” platform that could streamline it for both merchants and shoppers, and started coding in Python.
But she wasn't the only one to think so. Tech giants Shop Pay and Bolt were in the same space, but they were focused on the US market, with less emphasis on Europe. Shop Pay, for example, was founded in 2014 and has raised a total of $982.1 million to date. So what was Lamplugh planning to do with her little startup, which she called Simpler?
She brought in two friends from college, Alex Kyriakopoulos and Spiros Mandekis, and began building the team, raising $1 million in its first pre-seed round.
Today, Simpler has more than 250 merchants and 500,000 registered shoppers, and Lamprou said it expects to grow revenue tenfold by the end of 2025. The company recently raised 9 million euros (about $10 million) in a pre-Series A round to expand in the U.K., Italy and Spain, with participation from VentureFriends, MMC Ventures and Lamda Development.
“Yes, Bolt is a huge company, but it's focused on the US and is primarily dealing with fraud issues such as chargebacks, which are a huge problem in the US but less so in Europe,” she said.
In Europe, she says, there are different problems: “We have to localize and add all these different solutions, different providers. Each country has different needs, different customer preferences, different payment providers, loyalty coupons, etc.”
This is important because e-commerce sales in Europe grew 66% from 2019 to 2021. Despite the temporary decline, the market will continue to grow and could reach $955 billion by 2028.
The solution turned out to be an elegant one.
Simpler allows retailers to outsource payments, shipping and loyalty programs into one system, improving conversion rates and reducing complexity, the company says. For shoppers, it means one-click purchases across multiple stores and channels.
“We're seeing strong demand from both small and large businesses,” she said.
While Shop Pay is exclusive to Shopify, Simpler is designed for all platforms, and unlike Bolt, which focuses on the US market, Simpler targets the UK and Europe.
“We built a robust end-to-end solution with three orders of magnitude less capital than Bolt,” she added.