Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: E-commerce enabler Shopmatic, which focuses on small businesses and entrepreneurs, across India and other markets such as Malaysia and Hong Kong, and Singapore has registered over 40 per cent growth in revenues amid Covid for the April-December period, according to Co-founder and CEO Anurag Avula. The company is aiming to turn cash positive in the current year and has set a long-term target of becoming a $100 million business by 2024. “We have aggressive plans for 2021 to help SMEs go digital and will invest more to expand business in new markets in South East Asia,” Anurag Avula, CoFounder & CEO, Shopmatic told Financial Express Online.
The company posted more than $7 million in revenue for the nine-month period of FY21 ended December 2020, riding on an upward trajectory with its recently launched range of tech-enabled solutions for the countries’ SMEs and entrepreneurs. Shopmatic had turned EBITDA positive – a year earlier than it had projected. Around six-year-old Shopmatic enables e-commerce selling via chat, social media, marketplace platforms, and web stores for an annual hosting fee of Rs 50 and 3 per cent of each successful transaction. The startup had acquired CombineSell in October 2019 and Octopus Retail Management in March 2019 even as it had partnered with PayU, OnlineSales.ai, United Overseas Bank – Singapore, and CIMB Bank – Malaysia to help SMEs enhance their omnichannel presence.
The startup in May last year had launched a new solution for grocery or kirana stores to go online while it witnessed 80 percent growth over the July-September quarter in transactions and GMV compared to the previous quarter. It is now in advanced discussions with several investors for its Series B funding. Shopmatic has so far raised $5.7 million, as per Crunchbase. The global market for e-commerce software application will be worth more than $6.53 billion in revenue in 2021, up by more than $1.3 billion dollars since 2019, according to Statista. Indian e-commerce, which is currently led by Amazon, Flipkart, and others, was around $50 billion in 2018 and may reach $200 billion by 2027.
