Interview with Christian Würst, Managing Director and Sebastian Legler, Managing Director of Sovendus GmbH.
What is often called a win-win situation is realised by Sovendus GmbH, headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, by bringing customers and online shops together. "We support online businesses in being more competitive and help consumers to save money," the managing directors Sebastian Legler and Christian Würst agree. "Our goal is to become the leading checkout and digital marketing platform in Europe. To achieve this, we rely on our checkout marketing and onsite optimisation products."
For partner businesses, Sovendus opens the door to new groups of shoppers. "The idea of networking with other shops so that both the shops and the online shoppers benefit in the process, dates back to the days of the online shop Genussreich, founded in 1998," explains Christian Würst. "The founding of Sovendus GmbH by Oliver Stoll dates back to 2008. Internationalisation began as early as 2010 with the opening up of the DACH region. We are now represented in 12 countries, have foreign locations in Switzerland, the Netherlands, UK and Sweden and a network of over 1,300 online shops in Europe. Today Sovendus employs almost 150 people with an annual turnover of 40 million EUR. As an employer, the company offers classic benefits, a flexible home office policy and a modern corporate culture."
A team that complements each other
Sovendus is continuously expanding its network in Europe. At the beginning of 2022, a new management team came on board with Christian Würst and Sebastian Legler. Both managing directors started as management consultants and saw Sovendus as an exciting, fast-growing company.
"I have held various managing director positions in sales & marketing, also internationally," reports Christian Würst. "We have complementary characters, complement each other very well." And Sebastian Legler confirms: "We enjoy our cooperation in the management. We are in close exchange as a team and represent a great mission that helps businesses and consumers."
A network with advantages
The core of the Sovendus offer is the voucher network, in which everyone benefits from each other. It contains exciting offers for online shoppers and enables Sovendus partners to make relevant transactions by attracting new customers, additional sales, extra revenue and newsletter addresses. "We have a whole spectrum of offers for online businesses," Sebastian Legler emphasises. "About 45 million vouchers are issued per year. We have a newsletter base of about 3.1 million newsletter subscribers who are very active and look forward to savings offers. The Sovendus Checkout product, for example, rewards customers on the checkout page with special offers and free magazine subscriptions. New is our Sovendus Optimize offer, with which we help our partners to improve their conversion, i.e. to make shopping in the online shop easier for their customers.
A goal for the future
The vigorous development of online shopping during the coronavirus pandemic is declining somewhat, Christian Würst knows. "Now we must look for new ways to generate growth and make online shops more attractive and customer-friendly. Sovendus' ideas are in demand and enable access to new groups of buyers. The topic of conversion is promising for the future, and we are addressing this with our new product. It is also important to improve already existing sales channels."
The dedicated managing directors see enormous growth potential in the European market. Sebastian Legler, for example, believes that digitalisation offers ever better opportunities to work with the data collected in e-commerce. "We want to use this data to create even more relevant, individualised offers for our users. By further developing existing products, we are achieving our goal of being a leader as a checkout and digital marketing platform in all relevant European markets."
