E-commerce in Southeast Asia is very fragmented, with consumers having their choice of marketplaces, e-commerce sites and social commerce. Many prefer to buy from large marketplaces, says FLIK co-founder Ahmad Gadi, because those platforms offer promotions and cash-back deals. But for direct-to-consumer brands, marketplaces aren’t the best way to get consumer data or foster brand loyalty. That’s where FLIK’s unified payment solution comes in. It saves buyers’ checkout information across retail sites in FLIK’s merchant network, making buying easier and leading to higher conversion rates. For brands, it means more control over consumer data and fewer platform fees.

Based in Jakarta, FLIK announced today that it has raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding from East Ventures, with participation from Init-6, GMO VenturePartners and Saison Capital.

Before founding FLIK, Gadi’s previous startups included Pawoon, a point-of-sale platform that enables businesses to accept digital payments.

Gadi told TechCrunch that FLIK’s team is experienced in the payments and merchant business, both offline and online. “We thought that checkout is a very strategic area to build products on, because it is actually the point of entry for money into the business,” he said. “As online sellers in this region are becoming more savvy, they would want to be able to optimize their online business more deeply. We see an opportunity to unify checkout experience because this has always been an area that is difficult to solve outside the typical centralized platforms such as marketplaces.”

Because e-commerce and checkout methods are currently so fragmented, it’s hard for brands to consolidate data, Gadi added. By using FLIK, they can gain access to information like potential product upsells that can be offered at checkout based on shoppers’ browsing behaviors, and what types of discounts and promotions they are most interested in.

FLIK works with e-commerce sites built with platforms like WooCommerce and Magento, plus social media channels like Instagram shops and chat applications. It can also be embedded into blog articles to turn them into mini e-commerce sites.

FLIK plans to add more services, including product discovery, price comparison, rewards and post-purchase services like refund and returns processing. Shoppers can download its app to keep track of their purchases and offers.

Gadi says FLIK is currently positioned in a blue ocean space because other players in the D2C enabler space focus on Shopify-like storefront builders. FLIK, on the other hand, focuses on the checkout layer and building a network of shoppers. “Unifying all the fragmented checkout experiences on the web means we could work with all these D2C enablers out there to provide a consistent and optimized checkout layer on top of their existing platforms.”

(Source: Techcrunch)