ShopClues, the latest entrant in the Unicorn ecommerce segment in India, has made it clear that its merchant-centric strategy will help the company achieve gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $3 billion by the end of FY 2017.
“When we started in 2011, we had the vision of empowering and enabling our merchants to get a level playing field to compete with organised retail in India. We are still facing obstacles like a fragmented supply chain,” ShopClues co-founder and CEO Sanjay Sethi told Deccan Herald.
The company recently succeeded in acquiring four lakh merchants and shipping over three million items per month. “A majority of these merchants are from tier II and tier III cities. This happened because we believe in topline growth,” he said.
ShopClues works as a digital store for merchants and its robust platform give them Android apps. “Besides giving merchants a digital shop, we are providing website and Facebook pages to them, apart from an entire ERP solution. We believe our involvement in shipping, cataloguing, banking and advertising services through SMS and email, will help us deepen our relationship with merchants,” he said.
He opined that merchants who operate via ShopClues can be considered as a warehouse, which is the important aspect of our business, as it connects buyers with the nearest warehouses. “We are planning to connect merchants with buyers in a 200-300 km radius. It helps in getting products cheaply and quickly,” he said.
ShopClues tops the ecommerce business with its long-list of merchants. While Snapdeal follows the next position with two lakh merchants, Flipkart has only 80,000 merchants.
Amazon India recently unveiled a global selling programme where merchants in India can sell on its platform. The global ecommerce giant Alibaba claims to have about 4.5 million Indian SMEs on its platform.
Online marketplace is witnessing new initiatives by competing players. Paytm launched PayTm Force and Snapdeal rolled out Sherpalo recently. Flipkart unveiled its Flipkart Global as a pilot, so that it will not be left behind in the race.