After Paytm and eBay, Gurgaon-based e-commerce firm Shopclues is opening up an on-line platform for international firms to sell through its website. It has already tied up with China’s DH Gate which is a business-to-business marketplace that enables Chinese sellers to sell products globally.
The strategy along with its other initiatives will help the company’s gross merchandise value, or the total value of products sold, to increase six time to $1.2 billion by end of the current fiscal, Radhika Agarwal, co-founder of Shopclues.com told The Financial Express.
The company is also looking to partner other online marketplace across the world. The company “plans to have them on-board by the end of this fiscal,” she said. DH Gate, its current partner, competes with Alibaba owned Tao Bao in China.
Shopclues is the second e-commerce company after Paytm to tie-up with a Chinese e-commerce firm to sells Chinese products directly to Indian buyers. The company has also entered into an agreement with the US-based Shopyourworld.com to bring products into India from American sellers. Agarwal said Shopclues will host 15 million products by the end of this fiscal from multiple marketplaces global marketplaces, in addition to what its has from the 1,00,000 Indian sellers.
The e-commerce firm is also in talks with a Taiwanese online marketplace for a possible partnership, she said, but declined to name the company as the negotiations are in its early stages. To help its online business, Shopclues is also looking at building a complete logistics and delivery framework for its global sellers. “Unlike other e-commerce firms, we are looking at ease of business for our merchants. Everyone talks about customers, no one looks at the merchant side of the story,” said Sanjay Sethi, co-founder and CEO of Shopclues.
With Shopclues entering into the international seller space, Paytm will have tough competition. In July, PayTM had announced tie-up with Alibaba to host 100 million SKUs from about 10 million Chinese sellers. “Our tie-up will help us provide variety of products at much cheaper price points to Indian buyers at their door steps,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, co-founder and CEO of One97, which owns Paytm. ebay, the US-based auctioning e-commerce site already has 28 million products listed from American sellers on its India site — Global Easy Buy (GEB). “We had started GEB as we had seen problems customers faced from importing goods. We take care of all the delivery hassles for our customers,” Vidmay Naini, director and business head of Ebay had told FE earlier in an interaction.
Shopclues’ Agarwal said with global products coming to the marketplace, it will help customers in tier-II and tier-III towns get access to a larger variety of goods, which are unavailable in smaller towns, today. Shopclues has been focusing on smaller towns and cities as a part of their differentiating strategy from the very beginning. About 65% of its sellers are also from these town, and about 70% of its traffic comes from smaller towns.
As per a February report, it had a total listing of 16 million products, which is expected to cross 35 million by the end of the term.
