Fintech Simpl has introduced its checkout offering, Simpl Pay After Delivery (SPAD). Consumers can choose this option at checkout, which triggers payment only upon successful shipment delivery.
This helps assuage consumers’ concerns of money getting blocked because of an unsuccessful delivery, thereby helping them build trust in merchants and enhance user experience.
SPAD is built upon Simpl’s one-tap pay, which offers near-zero transaction failures and helps reduce returns and Cash-on-Delivery (CoD) orders for merchants. It will help build trust for consumers by enabling a transaction after the delivery of the shipment, thereby emulating the same CoD process and bringing enhanced convenience. This will also not require any action from the customer during delivery.
Consumers opting for SPAD will help reduce CoD orders for merchants. CoD accounts for nearly 60 per cent of all online transactions in India, mainly due to a lack of trust in merchants and this becomes significantly high for emerging merchants. Moreover, CoD orders witness nearly a fifth of all returns, making it a major pain point for merchants.
Simpl, which partners with over 26,000 merchants and users across India, is trying to resolve this issue with SPAD. The company claimed that large enterprise and D2C merchants have already adopted the feature across fashion, pharma and electronics categories. As more customers experience the convenience of SPAD, merchants are also expected to witness better customer loyalty and repeat purchases.
Commenting on the development, Puneet Singh, Chief Technology Officer at Simpl, said, “As an ecosystem-focused organisation, we are committed to solving pain points for both ends of the spectrum - consumers and merchants alike. SPAD will help enhance user experience, build trust and reduce CoD for merchants, thereby bringing business efficiencies”.
In the evolving world of e-commerce, customer expectations are rising continually, and they demand a seamless experience across the value chain. Here, the checkout stage becomes important to innovatively bring quick and convenient payment offerings to millions of consumers while helping merchants streamline their operations and reduce costs incurred during the returns.
Simpl has developed and strengthened its artificial intelligence (AI) powered technology platform, which powers consumers’ checkout journey seamlessly and helps merchants improve conversions while reducing returns and CoD. With more than 26,000 available merchants and millions of approved users pan-India, it envisions creating a frictionless and inclusive digital payments experience for India that empowers and fosters trust between merchants and their customers.
In 2021, Simpl raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Valar Ventures and IA Ventures, as well as existing investors. In April, the soonicorn trimmed 25 per cent of its workforce totalling to over 150 employees in a bid to reign in cut costs and extend its capital runway.
During an interview with CNBC-TV18, Simpl's co-founder and CEO, Nitya Sharma took responsibility for this "difficult decision" as the company had overestimated the growth of the e-commerce business.
“As we stood this year, we realised we need to become operationally more efficient so that we are able to focus on the most important customer priorities. There’s so much room to cover in the e-commerce space. The macro-economic condition last year was very different and allowed us to think we should probably hire a lot more people and work on many things parallelly,” he stated.
Simpl's revenue in FY22 surged over 17 times to Rs 31.63 crore, up from Rs 1.81 crore in FY21. However, its losses also multiplied, growing to Rs 144.28 crore in FY22 from Rs 6.39 crore in FY21.
