Swogo

Idea

Introduction

Swogo helps online stores increase their sales by up to 150% using our digital sales assistant technology.

Unlike shopping in store, there’s no-one online to help the potential customer. As 4 out of 5 people don’t have technical expertise, they struggle to make the right choice.

This has an even greater impact on online stores. On average - if 1,000 people come to the retailer’s site, 20 will buy, 260 will abandon it completely, and 720 will turn to a competitor to do more research. Our focus is this 720.

We offer e-commerce retailers a white label solution that takes their customers from the beginning of the buying process to the actual purchase. After years of research, we've created a system that defines customers’ needs by asking simple questions, allowing us to make precise product recommendations in just 60 seconds, starting with consumer electronics and home appliances.

Our solutions aim to increase conversions, increase basket value, and increase repeat purchases.

Intended impact

By guiding potential customers to the right product on an online store, we believe that the 720 people who would normally abandon a website to do more research will no longer need to do this. Instead, we provide them with all the information they need to make the right choice. This helps them make a decision, and as such, helps the online store increase their sales.

In order to show the value we could provide to retailers, we created an online store to put our technology to the test.

The average conversion rate for an online store is 2% - 2 people out of every 100 will buy. Using our technology on an unbranded e-commerce store, we found that 1 in 8 customers added the product to their shopping basket. Taking into account the customers who would leave their baskets without buying, this means a conversion rate of 5%.

To put this into perspective, imagine that an online store generates a monthly profit of £300,000 from laptop sales. Based on the results from our test, if the same amount of potential customers had used our technology instead, we could generate them up to £750,000. This is an uplift of 150%.

But that’s not all. As we've profiled the users, we know their wants, needs and even their budget, allowing us to cross-sell effectively. In the case of a laptop, we can sell 3G contracts for Internet on-the-go, or even the best suited laptop bag. This would allow retailers to optimise sales for products and accessories with high profit margins, making them even more money.

The customer would therefore be more happy with their purchase, and the retailer is able to increase conversions and increase basket value.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Not only have we identified a potential conversion uplift of 150%, we also have interest from online stores.

We're proud to announce that our trial for our paid launching partner, Create2Fit, began today - on Monday June 17th.

Create2Fit is a series of online stores which are owned by the RFS Holland Holding B.V. RFS Holland Holding takes an annual revenue of around €500 million. Create2Fit is operated by Wehkamp, who have over 120 million visitors to their online store every year.

At the end of our pilot stage, we plan to extend our reach to the UK.

We have also successfully secured nearly £100,000 in funding, through Seedrs, winning the NACUE startup competition, and through Startupbootcamp. We were chosen to participate in this year's Startupbootcamp Amsterdam, Europe's leading accelerator program for startups.

Monetisation strategy

We plan to charge our clients:

- A set-up fee (which would cover our costs of integration, including development and design).

- A monthly success fee.

Our success fee would allow us to take a split from all revenue we generate for the retailer. By offering this, we are able to grow alongside the company, and scale with retailers of all sizes.

Use of proceeds

£70,000 is intended to last us four months. With this capital, we will allocate:

- £30,000 towards development. We are currently relocating our development team from Portugal to London in order to bring them in-house. - £18,000 for the salaries of our five founders.

- £10,000 for the cost of our office space in London.

- £3,000 to cover the travel for sales' calls and meetings (as our clients are spread across the UK and Europe).

- 15% discrepancy for additional costs, including hosting, design, our accountant, and other expenses.

With this, we would be able to scale our client-base, as well as expand our product range, allowing us to upsell additional product recommendation services to our existing clients.