The Start-up India programme has unlocked many opportunities for entrepreneurs from smaller cities such as Lucknow, Jaipur, Indore, Bhopal, Kolhapur but they still find it difficult to create a dent in the competitive e-commerce industry. Eyeing the opportunities for an e-commerce enabler, Anurag Avula, Yen Ti Lim, and Kris Chen entered the Indian market in December 2014 to help merchants create a storefront for the unbranded category.
“We help sellers to create their own storefront to sell online. We provide an online presence, give them a storefront to create a brand identity and help them to sell across multiple channels such as eBay or ShopClues,” said Anurag Avula, CEO and co-founder of Shopmatic.
Besides creating a unique domain name for sellers, Shopmatic also puts them in touch with leading e-commerce platforms in India and helps them to sell on third party platforms. It has tie-ups with e-commerce platforms such as Lazada, eBay, and ShopClues where the sellers can list themselves.
Shopmatic charges a subscription fee besides a commission on sales. It offers subscription packages for different tenures—one month, six months and one year and charges $20, $120 and $240, respectively. “We have about 70% of customers opting for the 12-month package, and 15% each for one-month and six-months,” said Avula. “In October, our GMV ( gross merchandise value) was
$3 million and we are growing at 30-40% every month in terms of overall sales volume.” The return percentage on the platform is as low as 2%.
Shopmatic has two products—Shopmatic Pro providing the ecosystem to sell online and create a storefront, and Shopmatic Go, a mobile-first application for first-time entrepreneurs. For the Go platform, it does not charge a subscription fee from the sellers for setting up the online storefront but earns a commission from the payment gateway. “Capabilities on Shopmatic Go are contained as it only helps the seller to list on storefront, enable payments and shares on social channels,” added Avula.
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On the Shopmatic Pro platform, sellers have the option to create a storefront from over 60 templates, acquire a unique domain name, access payment gateway to receive payment from domestic and cross-border customer. “Revenue generation through inventory management and marketing is one of the options that we will explore,” shared Avula. “We are also looking at how we can enable the photography and content writing capabilities.”
Shopmatic started operations in January 2015 and has over 30,000 sellers on its Pro platform and about 23,000 sellers on the Go platform. By end of March 2017, it hopes to have 300,000 sellers and by December 2017, a million sellers listed on its Go and Pro platforms combined.
In the first half of 2017, it plans to explore markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Australia. It had raised seed funding in 2015 and is currently in talks with investors to close the next round of funding by March 2017, according to Avula.
