Jaypore carves niche biz model

Defying some of the defining trends in the ecommerce space, Jaypore has carved a niche for itself as a curation-led marketplace for anything truly Indian.

To propel its business interests, the three-and-a-half year old startup raised its first round of funding this year in February. However, it had already broken even at the time owing to its focus on bottomline rather than topline, said Jaypore co-founder Shilpa Sharma.

In the ecommerce space in India, which is driven by players operating open marketplace models, gross merchandise values (GMV), revenues and customer acquisition, have been trend defining factors.

Successive rounds of funding has come to be deemed as another character defining parameter for startups.

Sharma, however, opines, “Too much funding puts pressure on topline. It takes focus off the main proposition of the business, which is category creation. While everyone is talking about customer acquisition, our focus remains customer experience and retention. We have witnessed a repeat buying rate of 50% at Jaypore.”

She further augmented, “When the focus is not on the money, you can do a lot of things. We don’t sell on the strength of discounts. We realised early on that the cost of losing credibilty in the market is very high. Therefore, our focus is quality, which customers are starved of in the market of masses.”

The company, which recently launched its private label, plans to expand its footprint by improving representation on various vendor websites, including Jabong and Myntra.

“With the home brand, we intend to plug in for all the gaps, which we have identified in the market,” she said.

“Our goal now is to increase conversions on our website as we continue to gain interest from inspired buyers. Next, we intend to tackle the problem of running short on inventory and ‘sold out’ situations,” she added.

The company is targeting growth in revenues to the tune of 100%, which Sharma claims the company is closing in on.