Marcus Richards
Simpler makes everything shoppable with 1 click. We help merchants boost sales by making it extremely easy for shoppers to directly checkout from anywhere – both in the digital world (e-commerce stores, shoppable ads/content) and the physical world (brick & mortar, print ads, TV etc).
Tell us about yourself?
My background is in finance and adtech and I’ve always been involved in startups, leading their sales and product efforts.
I’ve always known I was a problem solver and an opportunity seeker, so right after my Master’s I realised that entrepreneurship was the right path for me. I decided to join then early stage startups in order to build this T-shaped skillset that a founder needs at the beginning, before jumping into my own ventures.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Not all problems are equal – focusing your energy on things that are much more worthy of your time can prevent bad decisions
What problem does your business solve?
Looking at it from the merchant’s perspective, this checkout friction translates into billions of dollars in lost revenue from abandoned carts.
Simpler is solving this problem by making it extremely easy for shoppers to buy anything online, giving them a single “shopping passport” so that every purchase is done with 1 click.
This can be done either in the traditional way, inside an e-commerce website or in a “remote” manner, simply by clicking on ad, email, newsletter etc or scanning a QR code that lets you directly purchase a product, without having to actually be on the merchant’s e-commerce store.
This is what we call “remote checkout”, which decouples the checkout process from the online stores for the first time. This is transformational in the way people shop and a win for both shoppers and merchants.
Our network of merchants see their conversion rates increase by 25% on average, which is a gamechanger.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
If you’re an online shopper like me, probably at least once you’ve felt frustrated when you arrived at a checkout page, trying to buy something you want, looking at a very long, and overly complicated checkout form, where you were asked to enter the same information again and again:
who you are, where you live, what you are paying with (your contact details, billing/shipping information, payment information). When covid started, during the lockdowns everyone turned to online shopping because it was our only option.
I was renovating my apartment at that time, making a zillion online purchases from different stores, but again facing the same frustration every time I was reaching the checkout step. Every time I was asked to enter the same data all over again, in a process that took at best 3-4 mins every time.
An over complicated and long checkout process is one of the main reasons that the vast majority of shoppers (70% on the web and 85% on mobile) abandon their carts at that final step. If you make it hard for your shoppers to complete a purchase, they will simply abandon the process and go elsewhere.
I was thinking that there had to be a better way. If I can use social logins to log into a website, why can’t I use such a service to checkout?
One independent service that is the source of truth for my data so that I will enter it once and then reuse it in every store I’m buying from, without having to trust each individual website or create accounts.
And then why can’t I have all my orders from the different stores centralised in one place and instead if I want to view, track or return an order I have to look for it among my thousands of emails?
This is how Simpler was born.
What is your magic sauce?
We offer an experience that covers the whole spectrum of what we call “checkout”. This starts with user details and extends to shipping methods and payment methods.
With our “Remote Checkout”, the shopper can checkout in seconds, without having to visit the merchant’s website or app: simply by clicking on an online advertisement, an email/newsletter, in a chat, a print ad, in a magazine, a product catalog or even from a TV ad.
In other words, we are making everything “shoppable”, taking the customer directly to the last step of the funnel and eliminating all redirections and steps in between (which directly increases conversions).
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Be the default way Europeans shop anything from anywhere!
We want to build a stellar team that will help make the company a leader and dominant player in the markets we are after.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
At the beginning it was harder to attract top talent, building in a stealth mode – now that the product is live and the feedback we get is great, it has become much easier to attract stellar employees
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We work with ecommerce merchants that want to increase their conversion rates and reduce cart abandonment by giving their shoppers a truly frictionless checkout experience.
We also work with agencies & merchants who want to shorten the purchase funnel by 90% and give shoppers the option to checkout directly at the point where their intent to buy was born.
