Making your smartphone the easiest device to shop with.
Business overview
| Location | LONDON, United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Social media | |
| Website | www.octer.co.uk |
| Sectors | Clothing & Accessories Mixed Digital/Non-Digital B2C |
| Company number | 08515185 |
| Incorporation date | 2 May 2013 |
Idea
Introduction
Your mobile phone is closer to you than any other device. You use it more and more for emails, social conversations, photo sharing, discovering music, buying tickets and ordering a taxi.
Yet we find shopping on mobile is frustrating.
We found that a standard web search leads to multiple retailer websites that, even when 'optimised' for mobile, are hampered by their e-commerce heritage. Comparison between retailers is difficult and there is no central place to store what you find. Checkout is laborious and cart abandonment rates are high. So we've developed a platform with one clear aim:
To make your smartphone the easiest of all devices to shop with.
FAST SEARCH - Top 500 retail search terms available in just 3 taps.
EASY COMPARISON - 1 tap to compare the market.
PAINLESS CHECKOUT - 1 tap to order and pay.
In the process of achieving these outcomes we are building a true major-retailer marketplace on smartphone.
Visit Octer.com to download the app on Android or iPhone.
Intended impact
Online shopping is increasingly moving mobile. A recent report by Barclays predicts that within 10 years, nearly half of all retail purchases will involve a mobile device – that’s £112bn in that year, in the UK alone.
The change in spending habits has been extraordinarily rapid. In 2009 just 14% of Britons owned a smartphone; now it’s approaching 70%. Worldwide, the penetration of smartphones eclipses any other device - for many it is the only computer they will ever own.
Sale conversion on smartphones is improving, but it is still only just over a quarter that of tablets and PCs. Tablets convert better than smartphones currently because e-commerce developed for PC’s works on tablets. We believe the principal reason for this is that the screen size is not that different. A website designed for a 13 inch screen still works well on a 9 inch screen.
OCTER is a smartphone-first solution for approximately 1.5bn smartphone users worldwide. It is a very big opportunity.
Substantial accomplishments to date
May 2014 - Seedrs round 1 broke records with $1m raised in 24hrs from +250 investors
October 2014 - 200 UK majors, 3m products
December 2014 - Multi-tiered, multi-clustered back end architecture completed
Jan 2015 - OCTER apps live on Android and iOS
Feb 2015 - 50k downloads achieved (50% organic)
Mar 2015 - March sales beat whole of 2014 sales. First hosted checkout live on OCTER.
April 2015 - Phase 2 revenue (Octer Premium) commenced. First contracts Jack Wills and Marks & Spencer.
Monetisation strategy
OCTER aims to serve the growth in smartphone shopping both nationally and internationally, with centralised tech and localised operational teams. Our business model is monetised in three ways which we believe to be highly scalable:
1. Affiliate partnerships - we have accounts with all the major affiliate networks and commission on sales are accelerating rapidly. We have now achieved 3 consecutive quarters of +200% sales growth.
2. Native advertising and product positioning income - in March 2015 our new Octer Premium programme was offered to a small number of leading retailers. Within 4 weeks we signed contracts with Jack Wills and Marks and Spencer. We achieved the initial 6 week sales target for M&S in less than 3 weeks.
3. Market Intelligence - we have found that retailers know what they are selling, but they have no reference as to how they are performing against competitors. We’ve developed early stage analytics as part of Octer Premium and will develop a more in-depth package in due course.
OCTER is a multi channel platform benefiting from free distribution via app stores and already encompass products in fashion, beauty, home, technology and gifts. Future expansion may include the large inventory of entertainment and some services. We continue to consider white label opportunities.
Use of proceeds
We will use the investment money to work towards the following milestones:
- Accelerating user acquisition
- Tailoring results on a personal basis
- Hosted-checkout rollout
- Growing first and second tier revenues
- Expanding overseas
We also have an exciting tech pipeline which aims to utilise the best features of smartphones and enhance the user experience by bridging the real-virtual world divide. Using our vast product database we would link users to items that are unavailable in the real world store - out of stock store sizes for example. We would also enable shopping of real world advertising and editorial content, from magazines and billboards.
Partner us in building the future of shopping.
Market
Target market
We believe OCTER has broad appeal. If you have a smartphone and want an easy way to find and compare products, we want you to become a OCTER user. But our users are not only consumers seeking to find and compare products. We are also enabling the major retailers to find their new customers in the mobile channel.
CONSUMERS
HER - she has an iPhone and already buys online, but mainly from her iPad or laptop. She finds shopping on her smartphone frustrating.
She wants all the retailers products in one place, on her iPhone because that's always with her and always on. She'd love it if the products in a category all matched her style and budget automatically. She wishes she could checkout simply and quickly - her details remembered regardless of which retailer she is buying from.
When she has a quiet moment, she likes to browse what's new and trending on OCTER. On many of her visits she will have absolutely no intention of purchasing anything.
HIM - he likes to look good and have the latest gadgets. Efficient shopping is appealing to him. Going to the shops isn't.
He uses his phone more and more to shop but checkout irritates him and often he doesn't complete a sale simply because of a distraction. He wants a faster solution and if his phone can offer this he'll use it.
When he is using OCTER he won't browse too long - in fact he mostly wont visit the app unless he needs to buy something. When he does he expects to find great products quickly and make fast decisions.
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RETAILERS
In the real world retailers exist alongside each other in High Streets, Shopping Malls and Retail Parks. This offers convenience to the consumer and passing trade to the retailer.
We have found that online, the major retailers are isolated and depend on back-to-back sale events, advertised to their existing customer base,
The major retailers understand the benefits of a virtual marketplace and a multi channel, content-led approach to customer acquisition.
Characteristics of target market
Online shopping is huge. The UK online retail market alone has passed £50bn and is highly consolidated; in fashion, the top ten companies have a 50% market share. In homeware consolidation is even higher.
Smartphone penetration continues to outpace all other devices. Projections are for approximately 3 billion users worldwide in just a few years. That includes almost 2/3 of all Americans. Nearly all users have their phones at the ready 24/7. Something that big, that all-encompassing and that personal doesn’t just constitute an opportunity, it defines a necessity.
Market conditions are ideal: Smartphones are highly developed with high resolution screens, 4G has rolled out, free WiFi coverage is growing, unlimited data bundles are packaged into phone contracts and the affiliate networks have mostly adapted to the growth of mobile.
Most importantly, consumer behaviour is changing due to these factors. People are buying more and more on their smartphones.
Marketing strategy
We aim to reach this market in several ways:
1. Online advertising - our download marketing strategy on Facebook has been extremely successful and we have achieved install costs well below the industry standard of circa £1 on an ongoing basis.
2. Inbound marketing - our social media presence is growing steadily and have had great success promoting retailers, with engagement on posts for SportsDirect and ASOS eclipsing even the best achieved by the brands themselves. We have found that significant user growth can be obtained directly from content-led activity on external social channels including our own multi-category blog.
3. Referral - we are in discussions with partners to introduce a groundbreaking referral reward programme.
4. Device distribution - in the longer term we will seek partnership with mobile telecoms companies in order to distribute the app pre-loaded on new devices.
Competition strategy
We believe OCTER is a unique proposition. It not only fills a gap in the market, it is designed to dominate it. Everything we do is defined by the following headline USP's:
CONSUMER: Smartphone as the easiest of devices to shop with.
RETAILER: Comprehensive major-retailer marketplace on mobile.
No other business that we know of is working towards these goals, let alone achieving them as we are.
To break this down further:
1. We aim to only work with the major stores. Shoppers want to buy brands they know from stores they trust. John Lewis alone has online sales of £1.4bn per annum.
2. We cover the whole of retail and are user agnostic. We have found that most other m-commerce apps are me-too, fashion feature apps - ie the numerous 'Tinder for Fashion' apps.
3. We are a true m-commerce business. We think the major player competition are focused on and restrained by their e-commerce legacy model.
4. Our unique taxonomy enables fast visual search and appears simple to the consumer. But in order to sort 3 million products from over 200 major stores we use complex search algorithms coupled with manually created exclusion and inclusion rules, resulting in more than 90 million queries per day. OCTER is a very complex platform to duplicate.
Visit Octer.com to download the app on Android or iPhone.
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