CashCashPinoy gets $2M funding for daily deals battle

Daily deals site CashCashPinoy revealed today that it has secured US$2 million in funding to aid its growth as one of the top ecommerce destinations in the Philippines. The investment comes from Singapore-based Hera Capital.

CashCashPinoy CEO Frederic Levy says that the site’s 1.5 million registered shoppers are now making an average of 35,000 transactions per month, resulting in about 23,000 monthly deliveries.

About 37 percent of the Philippines’ 98 million citizens are on the internet, according to data from the World Bank, so it’s a market with plenty of room for growth. CashCashPinoy is primarily battling Groupon, MetroDeal, eBay Deals, and LivingSocial’s Ensogo in the country.

The estore, which has expanded to cover things like travel booking, gadgets, and home furnishings – way beyond the initial daily deals fare of cheap restaurant deals – has now taken in about US$4 million in funding since it started in 2010. It has up to 3,000 deals active on the site at any time, up from the 650 it offered about a year ago.

The site has managed to grow strongly, Levy explains to Tech in Asia, despite the fact the team stopped spending on advertising at the start of 2013. Instead the startup used the money “to invest more in the quality of our deals.” Some of the injection from Hera will be used to “restart [our] media presence,” says Levy.

Today Levy also unveiled a new set of tools for CashCashPinoy’s merchants, called REVO, that promises to be “the complete ecommerce flow” for its sellers, covering everything from product sourcing to after sales support. The new backend system allows for the addition of new plugins at any time. One example is the support for merchants using Zendesk to deal with issues faced by customers.

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