MANILA – Voyager Innovations, the digital arm of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), has acquired Paywhere, the Singapore-based e-commerce startup behind TackThis!, for $5 million.
In a disclosure, PLDT stated that $3 million would be paid upfront, while the balance will be payable to the vendors in the future, called as a deferred consideration.
The acquisition is expected to be completed within the third quarter of 2015 and was done via Takatack Pte. Ltd. Paywhere will retain their office at Blk 71, which is part of LaunchPad, the upcoming ‘Silicon Valley’ of Singapore.
Founded in 2010 by Dickson Gregory, Vincent Lau and Damian Chow, Paywhere is best known for TackThis!, a cloud-based online store creator that can setup a basic digital store in minutes. It takes care of everything in the back-end—from storefront design to shopping carts, all the way to payment processing.
Voyager has been working with Paywhere in marketing TackThis! in the Philippines since 2013. The service is free for stores with no more than 10 products and charges P299 per month for stores with an inventory of 30 products.
A week before PLDT’s acquisition, Voyager, along with sister companies PLDT SME Nation and PLDT Alpha, launched a new service plan called TackThis! Concierge to also cover logistics, online marketing, and even booking photographers
Starting at a monthly fee P899, the premium plan pairs a business with TackThis! Ambassadors, which will take care of the nitty-gritties such as updating product inventory, processing of orders, verifying payments, and scheduling deliveries.
The concierge service also includes store marketing via placement on Takatack, the sister site of TackThis!, which is billed as the largest online shopping discovery platform with 300,000 products. Unique to Takatack is it aggregates and promotes products in other online stores including Zalora and Lazada.
“We want to reduce the complexities, the technological barriers, and the cost to deliver that comes with bringing a store online. With this acquisition of Paywhere, we are establishing a stronger foothold in existing markets as well as taking the opportunity to expand to new ones,” Orlando Vea, president and chief executive officer of Voyager said.
The name “TackThis!” is based on its ability to have the online store “tacked” or embed on to any website, blogging platform, or even Facebook.
A full online shop can be deployed in around a week. Asked on how TackThis! earns revenues, Mitch Padua, vice president and head of digital commerce at Voyager, shared with adobo that they get a commission ranging from 15% to 30%, depending on the scope of work.
