From tile to marble, switch to cement, water tap to tube—name the construction material and it is available on Supplified.com, an innovative online store set up by two smart entrepreneurs. This unique venture has been set up by Nalin Saluja and Mohit Goel to sell building and construction material to small and large construction companies in India. Till now, it has raised total funding of $2m from seed investor Mohit Goel. With almost a year into operations, the New Delhi-based portal has over 250 vendors listed on its platform, according to Saluja.
There was a huge opportunity in the construction market and an equally pressing need for an integrated marketplace for raw material and furnishing goods, bathroom fittings, kitchen appliances and electrical equipment, according to CEO Jatin Goel. Building material is Supplified’s core offering which fetches 60% of the total revenue, with cement being the top selling category.
Supplified operates on a marketplace model where the invoice is raised by the merchants for the consumers. Goel explains that the merchants are working on different levels with the company. “The merchant can be a brand, distributor or the final retailer, which depends on the category of the product,” he adds.
Like most marketplaces dealing with SMEs, Supplified seeks to provide financial assistance to small contractors who work largely on credit. Supplified has approached Capital Float to raise capital to the tune of R5-10 lakh to fulfils the credit needs of the small contractors who are buying material via Supplified.com. Saluja says that their venture will roll out the scheme over the next few months.
“We are in touch with (lending) companies and we have given out the names of our users to them. But lending is the not the core business so we will not be charging a commission for that. But we will use our connections to bring them on the same platform.” Jatin Goel said. Supplified processes about 14-15 transactions daily with an average ticket size of Rs 35,000. It clocked gross merchandise value of Rs 1.5 crore in July, 2016.
Unlike the logistics model of many e-tailing website, the delivery management at Supplified is responsibility of the vendor due to the nature of products in the building material category. Goel says, “We are not providing any warehousing services to our merchants. The fulfilment happens at the store of that particular seller. So all the packaging and delivery is borne by the seller. But for standardised products such as LED bulbs and kitchen appliances we have both the options available—we have our in-house logistics services and we also have the logistics service of the vendor.”
Supplified is not the only player in the space and it competes with other players in the construction space, such as Billzard.com based in Gurgaon, M-supply and Bilkar in Bengaluru, Central Mart in Mumbai, and e-construction mart in Gujarat. However, Goel believes that despite being an e-commerce marketplace, proximity is crucial in the construction business as logistics is a challenge in India.
Supplified is actively engaged in leveraging technology to make its business relevant to all its stakeholders. In May, Supplified launched its reverse-bidding app to allow vendors and consumers to set the price for the supplies brought on the platform. Supplified employees a statistical mechanism which helps the vendor to gauge the average selling price for a particular day. “We are in the process of building a strong backend and learning from the pilot that we are running right now. Over the next few months, we will launch the service in all of Delhi-NCR and thereafter grow city by city,” adds Saluja.