About Sowo
Trust that’s earned, not claimed.
Sowo is a UK marketplace for booking local services and buying products from the same providers. Every provider is identity-checked before they appear, and they build their reputation on real, paid bookings, not anonymous ratings.
What Sowo is
Sowo brings two things a local provider does into one trusted place: the services they book and the products they sell. You can find a barber, hair stylist or photographer near you, book them with your payment protected, and buy from their storefront, all from the same profile.
It runs in the UK, in pounds. What holds it together is trust: nobody appears until their identity is checked, and everything shown on a profile has to be earned through real bookings.
Longer term, we want a good reputation to be portable, so the trust a provider earns through real work stays with them as their business grows, rather than living in other people’s phones.
Why we built it
So much local trade runs on guesswork. You find someone through a screenshot, a group chat or a directory, and you hope. Reviews are easy to fake, easy to buy, and rarely tell you whether the person leaving them ever paid for anything.
For providers, the problem is the mirror image: a good reputation built up over years lives in other people’s phones and can’t travel with them. Sowo was built to fix both sides, so a customer can see who they’re dealing with, and a provider can carry the reputation they’ve earned.
How it works
Verified before they appear
Every provider completes an identity check before their profile goes live. You start from a known person, not an anonymous listing.
Payment held, then released
When you book, your payment is authorised and held by Stripe and only released to the provider once you confirm the work is done.
Reviews tied to real bookings
Because every review is linked to a completed, paid booking, a provider can’t collect ratings from people who never hired them.
Repeat customers can vouch, by name
Someone who has booked a provider more than once can add a named vouch, a stronger signal than a one-off star rating.
A Trust Passport that grows
Every completed booking, review and vouch adds to a provider’s Trust Passport, a record built from verified identity, real work, reviews and repeat-customer vouches.
Storefronts alongside services
Providers can sell products next to their bookable services, so you can buy from someone you already trust. This is an early pilot.
For the full picture, see how trust works on Sowo.
Why it’s different
Most marketplaces treat identity, payments, reviews and reputation as separate features that happen to sit on the same site. Sowo connects them into one loop, where each step depends on the one before it. We call it the Trust Loop.
Because a provider’s standing is tied to real, completed work rather than a wall of ratings, it’s hard to fake and hard to copy. That connected record is what makes choosing someone feel less like a gamble.
Who it’s for
For customers who want to book a local service, or buy from an independent provider, without the usual guesswork. For providers who want their reputation to be visible, portable and theirs.
Sowo was built with the UK’s African and multicultural communities in mind, the tailors, barbers, stylists, caterers and photographers whose best work has long travelled by word of mouth, and it’s open to everyone.
Sowo at a glance
- A UK company, building for the UK and open to everyone
- A marketplace for local services and provider storefronts
- Identity verification before a provider profile goes live
- Payments authorised and held by Stripe, released on completion
- Reviews only from completed, paid bookings
- Named vouches from repeat customers
- A Trust Passport that grows with every completed job
Where we are today
The marketplace is live in the UK: you can find identity-checked providers, book them with your payment protected, and leave reviews tied to real bookings. Provider storefronts are in an early pilot, and Sowo Day, our event-planning layer, is in development.
We’d rather tell you exactly where we are than dress up the stage we’re at. Trust is the whole point, and that starts with being straight about what’s built and what’s next.
We’re not building the place with the most reviews. We’re building the place where every review means something.