Veeqo
Cloud app for retail SMEs to manage their orders and inventory for their ecommerce and retail shops.
- Location
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Swansea,
United Kingdom
Categories: SaaS/PaaS Digital B2B
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Investment
sought: - £30,000
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Equity
offered: - 10.00%
-
Investment
amount: - £30,000
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Valuation
(pre-money): - £270,000
Idea
Introduction
Veeqo is a cloud-based app for retail (online and offline) small businesses which would allow them to manage their orders and inventory across all their channels.
Businesses now sell through ecommerce websites, Facebook, retail stores, eBay and Amazon and we want to make that process easier and more efficient.
We would bring enterprise-level features like Click & Collect to small businesses, enabling them to streamline their multi-channel approach.
Initally we plan the beta launch to sync with Shopify.com and we would then start work on Amazon, eBay and Xero.com integration.
Intended impact
Whilst we think managing orders in each of their sales channels systems is very hard for a retailer, we aim to bring all their orders into Veeqo to manage.
We would make managing these orders much easier with courier integration to print shipping labels automatically, so no copy and pasting addresses anymore, with tracking numbers updating the original sales channel.
Advanced order workflow management, grouping orders by status/warehouse/sales channel and more.
We think syncing inventory across all those sales channels is even harder and often ends in over sellings. Veeqo would manage this for you, syncing your inventory in real time to all your sales channels.
The system would manage cost of inventory very carefully, thus allowing business to see their true margin by product/group and, most usefully, by sales channel.
Substantial accomplishments to date
We believe that development on our solution is well advanced, with our two two major modules - Inventory and Orders - 90% and 70% complete respectively.
The system currently syncs inventory and orders with Shopify.com. and allows the creation of manual orders. The inventory system is fully working so you can create purchase orders, move stock between warehouses, add/edit products.
We have a number of good leads from businesses that would like to get involved in the beta when it's ready.
Monetisation strategy
We would operate as a SaaS, with a monthly fee for customers depending on their size. See our pricing model here: http://www.veeqo.com/pricing.
We don't plan to charge setup costs for customers and would offer a 30 day free trial.
Use of proceeds
The money would pay for two Ruby on Rails web developers and one front end developer to finish the project. A team of freelancers is in place already and have been working on the project.
We do not plan to use the proceeds for my salary or office space. A sum would be used for the initial marketing we intended to do, as well as paying the fees for raising capital.
Market
Target market
Small and medium businesses around the world that sell online.
Initially we would target the UK, but would start integrating key couriers (UPS/FedEx) after that so we can launch in the US.
Characteristics of target market
There are 228,000 online retail businesses in the UK alone. This would be our initial target, but we expect that the app would work around the world.
Marketing strategy
Our Marketing Strategy would consist of:
(1) Back linking campaign to target keywords in Google to achieve top 5 rankings in organic search results.
(2) PPC campaign in Google and Bing. Limited budget required due to niche terms we are targeting.
(3) Heavy use of Twitter and Facebook to build a targeted following. Leverage our partners support (such as Shopify) to push our messages out.
(4) Self promotion on UK based small businesses forums.
(5) Incentive exiting customers with to refer us in return for cash reward.
(6) Integrate, Integrate, Integrate. Every ecommerce system we plan to link with would open our systems to thousands more users. We also believe most systems would market our service in their app store.
(7) We have built the system with the plan to release an API so anyone could integrate their website/pos/accounts into our system.
Competition strategy
The idea of Veeqo was born from the frustration that none of the existing solutions met our needs.
In our view, ChannelAdvisor and eSellerPro both lack transparent pricing/instant setup and in the end charge over £1,000 a month.
Our app would have features we consider missing from others such as:
(1) Click & Collect feature, to let customer choose a store/warehouse to collect goods from.
(2) Ability to create orders and choose different warehouses to fulfil that order, which maximises your inventory across the business.
(3) Web based app, which means it would works on PCs, Macs, tablets and even smart phones. Stock takes, for example, could be done by walking around your warehouse/store with an ipad.
(4) Product gross margin matters: we would carefully calculate this so that it's easy to see what your gross margin would be on any given day/month/year.