MyGate forays into community omnicommerce with 80 brands

Community Management player MyGate on Wednesday announced its foray into ‘Community Omnicommerce’ with the launch of MyGate Exclusives.

Commerce coming to doorstep or community buying as a concept was always a part of the plan for MyGate, but the launch was pushed by the Covid-induced lockdown. MyGate Exclusives are offerings by brands only available to people on the MyGate app.

To begin with, it will offer 80+ emerging and national brands to its customers across categories and plans to empanel 200+ brands by March 2021.

With the company's presence in 15,000+ societies in 2.5 million+ urban homes, MyGate COO and Co-founder Abhishek Kumar, says they view commerce with a very different lens. The company is aiming at achieving an additional revenue of Rs 2 crore from this platform by the end of the year.

The overall market of commerce that happens in a community is around $3-$4 billion in India.

"The hypothesis we had when we started was that at some point, communities will realise the collective power of community commerce. This actually happened during the lockdown in an unstructured way, when somebody voluntarily created WhatsApp groups, brought people together. The behavioural shift that happened has not gone away and this is what we are looking to capitalise on," says Kumar.

From a brand perspective, on the MyGate app, they will be able to have a very specific target group, which is otherwise hard to capture, says the founder.

"Gated communities are hotspots of consumption and represent certain income levels. We see gated communities as a homogenous userbase. You can draw certain consumption parallels and trends, and that is something nobody has the ability to harness but MyGate."

Some of the offerings include a mini UPS for a wi-fi router at a price lower than other ecommerce platforms, or a subscription-based water purifier, which would be available free at the MyGate app for a first-month trial.

He says it is not looking to compete with the likes of 'BigBaskets or Flipkarts of the world' and look to bring those products and features that from a community standpoint have a higher frequency.

The major categories that the company will be focussing on are home essentials, home services/ home solutions, health at home, and Kids.