About Sowo
Trust that’s earned, not claimed.
Sowo is the UK’s first trust-first local commerce and community platform. Today that means booking local services and buying products from the same providers, with event planning and local communities in development. Every provider is reviewed by our team before they appear, they can verify their ID for a verified tick, 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 our team has reviewed them. Completed jobs, customer reviews and repeat-customer vouches are recorded from activity that happens on Sowo.
Longer term, we want providers to be able to take the reputation they earn through real work with them as their business grows. That portability is a goal, not a feature available today.
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
Reviewed before they appear
Every provider is reviewed by our team before their profile goes live, and providers can verify their identity to earn the blue seal.
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 work
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 real work, transaction-backed reviews, repeat-customer vouches and identity verification where earned.
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, or how Sowo works for the mechanisms behind it.
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 the reputation they earn to be visible and useful as their business grows.
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
- Team review before a provider profile goes live, with identity verification for the verified seal
- Payments processed by Stripe
- Reviews only from completed, paid bookings or orders
- 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 providers, book them with payments processed by Stripe, and leave reviews tied to real bookings and orders. 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.
Who built it
Abiodun Oyerinde is the founder of Sowo. He created Sowo to help independent service businesses manage bookings, sales, payments and transaction-backed reputation through one platform.
We’re not building the place with the most reviews. We’re building the place where every review means something.