Shopping chat app Goodbox acquires loyalty card startup, expands

Photo credit: Stefano Ravalli

Bangalore-based startup Goodbox today announced the acquisition of SmartPocket, a startup that operated as an app that digitized loyalty cards.

Goodbox makes a messaging app through which online shoppers can interact with small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). Buyers can pay for goods with a credit card, debit card, or via net banking. Goodbox charges merchants a yearly fee and also takes a transaction fee for each payment.

Goodbox raised two rounds of funding last year, including a seed round of US$200,000 in May and a series A of US$2.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners in November.

“When we met the SmartPocket team, there was an instant connection,” explains Abey Zachariah, co-founder of Goodbox. “In terms of the long term vision of the product, we really felt it.” While SmartPocket’s product is significantly different than that of Goodbox, Abey explains that the vision remains the same. “They had a similar offline to online type of thing that we thought would be useful to have inhouse,” he says. The acquihire means that SmartPocket’s entire team will join Goodbox. The two co-founders, Kiran Shastri and Mayank Shah, will also join Goodbox’s leadership team. SmartPocket has raised US$200,000 in angel money.

Plenty of competition

While there are few other apps dedicated to helping shoppers connect with SMEs, major chat apps with huge followings exist in the sector. Line released a global freemium spinoff of its popular messaging app specifically focused on shopping in February, and WeChat has lots of online shopping and payments options for businesses of all sizes. Both allow for payments within the apps. WhatsApp, India’s most popular chat app, announced yesterday that it was making its service entirely free and considering new ways with which to monetize off businesses. For whatever reason (my guess is payment transaction difficulties), none of these services exist in India yet.

It’s hard to tell whether the deciding factor in this sector is the giant customer bases that the likes of WhatsApp and Line have, or whether it will be the ability of a service like Goodbox to focus its technology strictly on shopping. As the (now old) adage goes, chat is eating the world.

See: The amazing ways WeChat is used in China