Looking to reinvent the e-commerce experience, Amano junks the email, raises €1.5 million

Warsaw-based startup Amano has raised €1.5 million in a pre-seed round and is looking to improve the e-commerce experience, specifically post-sale. While still in development, the startups’ promise includes an aggregator that will do away with numerous emails from various vendors, providing consumers with a comprehensive overview of all things where and when. Previously bootstrapped and supporting a team of 12, Amano's new funding will be used to further drive recruitment efforts in tandem with product development.

Having built online platform Frisco.pl (acquired by Eurocash in 2015) and Daily.pl (acquired by Wolt in 2018), serial entrepreneurs Małgorzata Sitkowska and Nicolas Jedraszak are now taking on the hefty challenge of reinventing the post-purchase e-commerce experience.

“We noticed that currently, everything that happens the second after you make a purchase online makes little sense from the consumer perspective,” explained Sitkowska. “Most of the communications between the customers, the stores, and the delivery providers happen through emails. If you look at the amount of purchase-related emails and the hundreds of newsletters we receive each month, it gets very difficult to track what is happening with your purchases at any given moment in time.”

Checking the validity of this statement, a quick flip over to my inbox revealed that of the 50 displayed,18 of them were in one way or another, e-commerce related. Now I don’t know about you, but generally, until my order doesn’t arrive, these are emails I usually just ignore.

Clearly, I'm not alone, as Amano wants to wrangle all those emails into one corral, regardless of the marketplace, and provide punters with real-time tracking stats, alongside a 1-click complaint and/or return process, something that we’ve all become accustomed to, but outside of Amazon or Zalando can leave some vendors scratching their heads.

Flipping the coin and looking at Amano from a merchant perspective; about those emails I regularly ignore? Say it with me now: missed engagement opportunity.

If all goes according to plan at Amano, by providing consumers with a simplified overview, the service will offer countless numbers of sellers a new opportunity to improve relationships and increase engagement opportunities.

With e-commerce becoming so de rigueur that the e should be dropped and anything else classified with q (quicky) or p (physical), the market will soon enough sort out the vendors that are able to convert first-time shoppers to repeat, loyal patrons from those that do not.

Amano’s €1.5 million pre-seed funding was provided by KAYA VC, Big Bets VC, Next Road Ventures, and Kogito Ventures. The startup also saw backing from host of angel investors including Snowflake co-founder Marcin Żukowski, Sebastian Szczygiel, former CMO of Huuuge, and now running Kickstart Mobile, and Packhelp founders Wojciech Sadowski and Maciej Zając.

“The frequency of online purchases has grown to unprecedented figures and e-commerce has become a core part of the economy. This represents an exciting opportunity for Amano to redesign the communication between merchants and consumers and to elevate user experience to the next level,” concludes KAYA VC’s  Tomas Pacinda.