Seoul-based e-commerce company named Levit which runs a shopping app named Always has secured a funding round of $46 million in Series B and it says that they want to make the experience of online shopping fun again. It is similar to any e-commerce app where you can shop for groceries or home appliances or apparels but what is different is that it makes the shopping fun “by incorporating social features like short videos and gamification into online shopping to draw customers”.
CEO and Co-founder of Levit, Jaeyun Kang, said “Our average product selling price is around 20% cheaper than the lowest prices on other e-commerce platforms,” and added that “This has been made possible because lesser-known brands, which traditionally spent nearly 30-50% of the selling price on marketing in search-based [e-commerce] platforms, can now sell their products more efficiently on Alwayz through discovery-based shopping.” He also mentioned, “As users enjoy the engaging experience on our platform, we leverage their high engagement to expose them to a range of items through our recommendation algorithms. This way, even if items are from lesser-known brands, customers can discover and buy them”. He even touched upon the fact that they “ensure an item isn’t widely exposed until it has proven its quality, and this approach allows us to maintain the quality of items,”
Daegwon Chae, the general partner of BOND, said, “Disruption in horizontal commerce is rare,” and added, “Dislodging large incumbents requires meaningfully better, faster, cheaper experiences, which are difficult to achieve in a mature and efficient market. Alwayz has broken through with its relentless focus on user experience, engagement and value.” It is worth noting that the number provided by Alwayz are good at the moment. The company claims that “Since its launch in September 2021, the startup claims Alwayz has amassed 1 million users within three months and has reached 7 million users, 2.5 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 1.3 million daily active users (DAUs) in one and a half years. Alwayz aims to secure more than 12 million registered users, 5 million MAUs, and 3 million DAUs by the end of 2023″. The CEO also says that they have 20,000 sellers registered on the app right now.
