The shopping app Alwayz is run by the Seoul-based e-commerce company Levit. Alwayz raised $46 million to make shopping more fun and cheap in South Korea.
The two-year-old startup Alwayz raised $46 million in a Series B round of funding, which was led by DST Global Partners and included new investor BOND and current backers KB Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, Korea Investment Partners, GS Ventures, and Klim Ventures.
Levit has now raised a total of $67 million since it was first started.
Alwayz sells a lot of different things, from everyday groceries to home tools, clothing, and even cosmetics. But it is different from most e-commerce sites because it uses social features like short videos and game-like elements to get people to shop online.
For example, users can get prizes by playing games and taking care of the pig character Don-Don-E, or they can get real crops after growing them successfully in a game called AI-Farm in the app. Also, Alwayz just added a new tool called “Shorts” that lets users watch short videos and get discounts when they shop.
It also gets users by selling things at low prices. When Alwayz users buy things with other Alwayz users or their friends, they get savings. The C2M (consumer-to-manufacturer) approach of Alwayz gets rid of logistics, inventory, and other middlemen, so the app can sell high-quality goods at lower prices. The company says that most of the people who sell on Alwayz are makers or manufacturers.
The CEO and co-founder of Levit, Jaeyun Kang, said, “The average price of a product we sell is about 20% less than the lowest price on other e-commerce platforms.” “This is possible because less well-known brands, which used to spend 30–50% of the selling price on marketing on search-based e-commerce platforms, can now sell their products more efficiently on Alwayz through discovery-based shopping.”
Levit says that games and social features make it easy for people to use the Alwayz app every day and see different goods, even if they don’t plan to buy right away.
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“Because our users like how engaging our platform is, we use their high involvement to show them a wide range of products through our recommendation algorithms. “This way, customers can find and buy items from brands that aren’t as well-known,” Kang said. Levit calls this kind of event for the user a “discovery shopping experience.”
When asked how it makes sure that low-priced products are of good quality, the CEO of the company said that all items on Alwayz are evaluated by its suggestion algorithms, which look at things like conversion and customer repurchase rates. “We make sure an item doesn’t get a lot of attention until it’s proven to be good, and this way we can keep the quality of the items,” he said.
Alwayz raised $46 million to make shopping more fun and cheap in South Korea, since its launch in September 2021, the startup says that Alwayz has gained 1 million users in three months and 7 million users, 2.5 million monthly active users (MAUs), and 1.3 million daily active users (DAUs) in one and a half years. Kang said that by the end of 2023, Alwayz wants to have more than 12 million registered users, 5 million MAUs, and 3 million DAUs. He also said that nearly 20,000 sellers have signed up to sell on the app.
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Kang, Sangwoo Park, and Hyunjik Lee, the three owners of Levit, have set their sights on two big goals: making Levit the best e-commerce company in South Korea and getting a big share of the discovery shopping market around the world.
Alwayz has to compete with local companies like Coupang, Naver, and Kurly, but its business model is more like that of U.S.-listed e-commerce company Pinduoduo and China-based AliExpress in terms of social features and lower-priced goods.
The company, which has 20 people on its team, wants to sell its platform in the U.S. as soon as this year.
“Disruptions in horizontal commerce are rare,” said Daegwon Chae, general partner of BOND. “Replacing big players needs significantly better, faster, and cheaper experiences, which are hard to come by in a mature market that works well. Alwayz has made it big because it never stops focusing on the user experience, engagement, and worth.
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