Interview Preparation

Seoul-based e-commerce company Levita shopping app operator Always, wants to make the shopping experience more entertaining and affordable. The two-year-old startup has recently raised $46 million in a Series B funding round led by DST Global Partners with participation from new investor BOND and existing backers KB Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, Korea Investment Partners, GS Ventures and Klim. Ventures. . With the latest round, Levit has raised a total of $67 million since its inception.

Alwayz offers a wide range of products from daily groceries to home appliances, clothing and cosmetics. But it deviates from typical eCommerce platforms by incorporating social features like short videos and gamification into online shopping to attract customers.

For example, users can earn rewards by playing games by raising the pig character Don-Don-E, or receive real-life crops after successful farming by playing a game called AI-Farm in their app. Also, Alwayz recently introduced a “Shorts” feature that allows users to watch short videos and in return get discounts when shopping.

It also attracts customers with low-priced products. Users get discounts if they buy products with other users or their friends on Alwayz. always C2M model (consumer to manufacturer) It removes layers of distributors, including logistics, inventory, and other intermediaries, allowing the app to offer high-quality products at lower prices. Most of Alwayz’s sellers are producers or manufacturers, according to the company.

“The average selling price of our product is around 20% cheaper than the lowest prices on other e-commerce platforms,” Levit CEO and co-founder Jaeyun Kang said. “This has been possible because lesser-known brands, who traditionally spent 30-50% of sales price marketing on search-based (e-commerce) platforms, can now more efficiently sell their products on Alwayz at through discovery-based shopping.”

Levit says that the games and social features help users get into the Alwayz app every day and be exposed to various products, even if they don’t intend to buy them right away.

“As users enjoy the engaging experience on our platform, we leverage their high engagement to expose them to a variety of articles through our recommendation algorithms. This way, even if the items are from lesser-known brands, customers can still discover and buy them,” Kang said. Levit describes this user experience as a “discovery shopping experience.”

When asked how he ensures low-priced products are high-quality, the company CEO said that his recommendation algorithms evaluate all items on Alwayz, using factors such as conversion and customer repurchase rates. “We make sure that an article is not widely exposed until it has proven its quality, and this approach allows us to maintain the quality of the articles,” he said.

Image Credits: Levit / Always

Since its launch in September 2021, the startup claims that Alwayz has amassed 1 million users in three months and has reached 7 million users, 2.5 million monthly active users (MAUs), and 1.3 million active users. per day (DAU) in a year and a half. Alwayz aims to secure more than 12 million registered users, 5 million MAUs and 3 million DAUs by the end of 2023, Kang said, adding that it has nearly 20,000 registered sellers on the app.

Levit’s three founders, Kang, Sangwoo Park and Hyunjik Lee, have set two ambitious goals: to establish Levit as the leading e-commerce company in South Korea and capturing a significant share of the global discovery sourcing market.

Alwayz has to compete with local peers such as Coupang, Naver and Kurly, but its business model is more akin to US-listed e-commerce. pinduoduo and based in China aliexpress in terms of social features and lower-priced products.

The team, which has 20 people on the team, plans to bring its platform to the US market this year.

“Horizontal trade disruption is rare,” said Daegwon Chae, general partner at BOND. “Displacing the big incumbents requires significantly better, faster, and cheaper experiences, which are hard to achieve in a mature and efficient marketplace. Alwayz has broken through with its relentless focus on user experience, engagement and value.”