Nigerian One-click Checkout Startup OurPass Raises $1M Pre-seed, Plans To Build ‘Fast For Africa’

Nigerian e-commerce firm OurPass has raised $1 million in a pre-seed round to scale its operations and expand across the country. The round was led by Tekedia Capital and angel investors from Fortune 500 companies.

The one-click checkout firm said that it is on a mission to build Africa’s Fast, an American e-commerce company that provides online login and checkout solutions designed to provide users with a secure shopping experience.

OurPass’ move to build a “Fast for Africa” is nothing short of necessary, considering the hassle that consumers and online retailers have to go through while shopping online. They often have to set up multiple accounts on different platforms and also go through a rigorous checkout process. In some cases, customers get tired and move on to a different online store.

While the narrative of online payments is slowly changing, with the likes of Paystack and Flutterwave making the collection of online payments easier for merchants, online checkout remains a problem. Yearly, about 75 percent of shopping carts are abandoned due to the stress of re-logging in, and the rigorous fill-a-form checkout process.

To solve this problem, OurPass provides a mobile application that enables consumers to shop with one click. The first time consumers sign up on the OurPass platform, they enter their names, email, and shipping addresses. OurPass then creates an identity for each customer, which is passed across every online store they shop. “We built an identity layer across the web to enable consumer identity to be sent across to every single online store they go to check out from,” said Samuel Eze, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of OurPass.

This way, OurPass customers do not have to fill any form while checking out and are prevented from experiencing the stress of re-logging. But there’s a catch; customers can only shop with merchants that have OurPass API linked to their platforms.

OurPass’ one-click checkout happens to not be its only perk. It also offers free delivery on all orders for customers, and to do this, it partnered with logistics companies like MAX.ng and Gokada.

Since it launched beta in May last year, OurPass claims to have completed $500,000 in transaction value. The company hopes its continuous growth will see it become the go-to platform for consumer checkout in Nigeria by 2023. The company also plans to work with merchants on e-commerce platforms, including WooCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, and Shopify, as well as with social commerce platforms like Facebook and Instagram.