Shopback gives you cashback for online shopping, and it just raised $600k from investors

Imagine getting a few dollars back for each purchase of a dress at Asos or a watch at Lazada – or any item, for that matter. That’s the promise of Shopback, a Singapore-based ecommerce cashback startup that’s already offering discounts at over 300 online stores in under a year.

The concept is easy to grasp: Shopback is an affiliate marketer that receives a commission for every sale it generates on various ecommerce sites. It then passes some of the earnings back to shoppers. Consumers of course would be drawn to the site – who doesn’t love a good discount? It most recently did over 10,000 orders a month, and is serving 10,000 daily active users. This hints at a potential of a five-digit monthly revenue to start with – it received commission for all its orders.

The traction has convinced Singapore-based investors Accel-X and East Ventures to put in US$600,000 in seed funding (led by the latter) into the company (disclosure: East Ventures is an investor in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page for more information). This followed from a US$500,000 round which it raised in April 2014 from Accel-X and other investors – even before the product launched.

“We were all working in ecommerce and saw that the cashback concept was very established in the US and UK, but nobody was creating such a service for Southeast Asia,” says Henry Chan, co-founder of Shopback, who previously worked at Zalora and SingPost eCommerce. He’s referring to companies like Ebates, which was acquired by Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten for US$1 billion.

The Shopback team.

Shopback was started in the midst of an ecommerce investment boom in Southeast Asia. Rocket Internet has poured hundreds of millions into its regional ventures like Lazada and Zalora.

Indonesia’s Tokopedia has raised US$100 million from top-tier venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Japanese conglomerate Softbank, and others. Many other Rocket executives have left to start their own companies, and Shopback is just the latest.

The Shopback model is certainly right out of Rocket’s playbook. It’s an aggressive landgrab for dominance in Southeast Asia, riding on the wave of hot ecommerce money and rising consumer appetite for online shopping. It’s about transplanting a familiar business model into a new environment. If Shopback succeeds, don’t be surprised if it becomes a hot acquisition target for Rocket, Rakuten, or any other large ecommerce firm.