R. Lamprou & A. Kyriakopoulos Simpler: Turning Checkout into a Growth Driver for E-commerce Brands

Simpler is a checkout infrastructure company. We help merchants remove friction at the point of purchase and unlock new conversion by offering a universal “shopping passport.” Shoppers complete their first purchase with Simpler once, and from then on they can check out instantly across any Simpler-enabled store or channel, from a webshop to a newsletter, a QR code, or even inside an AI assistant.

The idea came from personal frustration. During the Covid lockdown I was shopping online more than ever, and every checkout felt like a wall - repetitive forms, passwords, and friction at the moment I’d already decided to buy. Merchants were spending to bring me in, but losing me at the last step.
That pain point was glaring: everyone was focusing on payments, but checkout itself - the conversion moment - was broken. It was the last big bottleneck in e-commerce, and we saw the opportunity to rebuild it as infrastructure rather than yet another plugin.

Simpler was founded by three of us:

• Rania Lamprou (CEO) – background in international management, with a career across product, marketing, and business development. I’ve led sales and product teams and always worked at the intersection of commerce and tech.


• Spyros Mandekis (CTO/Product) – an engineer and product leader with deep experience building complex platforms from scratch.


• Alex Kyriakopoulos (COO/Operations & Sales) – brings operational rigor and sales leadership, with experience scaling teams and managing client relationships.



We first met at university and reconnected later in our careers, each bringing a different perspective: product, technology, and go-to-market. What united us was a shared conviction that checkout is broken, both for shoppers and for merchants. That complementary mix of skills and the long-standing trust between us is what allowed us to build Simpler from the ground up.

Some of the big milestones for us were:

• Launching with our very first merchant in Greece - proving that the product worked end-to-end.


• Expanding into Spain and the UK, where we quickly saw strong adoption in fashion and lifestyle e-commerce.


• Closing our pre-Series A round of €9 led by a strategic fintech investor, which gave us the firepower to accelerate across Europe.


• Signing some of Europe’s largest retailers through a very important strategic partnership - which will bring Simpler to a network of 100+ brands.



Looking forward, our focus is on making Checkout-as-a-Service the default for merchants who want the best converting checkout, without the burden of maintaining it in-house. That means expanding integrations across platforms, building deeper loyalty and personalization features, and pushing into embedded commerce (AI, chat, QR, social).
 

Early on we decided not to stop at a “fast checkout button” or a “saved payments” layer - even though that would have been easier and faster to build. Instead, we went for the full checkout infrastructure: cart, authentication, shipping, payments, loyalty, fraud.
It felt risky because it’s a much heavier lift technically, and it meant longer integration cycles before we could show results. But in hindsight, it was the best decision we made. Merchants don’t just want another plug-in - they want to outsource the entire checkout headache. Going all-in on Checkout-as-a-Service is what really differentiated Simpler and put us in a position to scale.
 

Working with Relevance has been very helpful because they understand both performance marketing and e-commerce conversion - two areas that tie directly into what we do. On the one hand, they help us reach merchants with the right campaigns and messaging. On the other, their performance mindset aligns perfectly with our value proposition: we win when conversion rates go up.
It’s not just about marketing spend, it’s about having a partner who challenges our positioning, helps refine how we show ROI to merchants, and brings in insights from across their client portfolio. That combination of practical performance expertise and strategic perspective has been very valuable.
 

That checkout is just about payments. Payments are commoditized, checkout is where the sale lives or dies. The old idea was “just add more payment methods and conversion will follow.” We’re proving it wrong by showing that a fully integrated checkout -covering identity, shipping, loyalty, fraud, and payments- removes friction and lifts conversion across the board. That’s why merchants see 20–40% fewer abandoned carts and 30%+ more repeat purchases with Simpler.

The user experience. Checkout has to feel effortless for the shopper, no matter the merchant, channel, or device. If it becomes clunky or adds extra steps, it defeats the whole purpose. Even as we scale, we always come back to: does this make the purchase easier and faster for the shopper?

“Relentless learning.” 

Every stage -fundraising, hiring, building, selling- has been new territory. We’ve had to adapt constantly, listening to merchants, iterating on the product, refining the pitch. It’s been challenging, but that process of learning fast and applying it immediately is what’s kept us moving forward.