DealShare is an e-commerce platform that targets a specific user group and recently the company has announced to conclude its Series C funding round with $21 million. The funding round was led by WestBridge Capital.
According to reports, the funding round also witnessed participation from multiple investors such as Falcon Edge Capital’s Alpha Wave Incubation, Matrix Partners India, Z3Partners and Omidyar Network India. Individual marquee investors also participated in this funding round.
The Jaipur-Rajasthan based start-up was founded back in September 2018 by Vineet Rao, Sankar Bora and Sourjyendu Medda. The e-commerce platform specifically targets only medium and lower-income consumers providing them with over 20,000 products from various categories such as Electronics, grocery, fruits, gift packs and other household items. The brand claims to give even better prices than wholesale.
Rewinding back to when DealShare started, co-founders mentioned that in the initial stages of the company, WhatsApp was the best mode of running their e-commerce business. Co-founder Vineet Rao explicitly mentions that doing this business clearly showed that people were only interested to buy products that were on cheaper and discounted prices.
He added that later on, this idea of incentivising products and offering discounted deals to consumers became their primary offering. Along with discounts, the company started giving great deals on products followed by amazing cashback. The cashback could be redeemed by users when they share the deal with their friends.
This was a brief journey on how DealShare came into the business and with time, the e-commerce platform launched its own website and mobile app.
Furthermore, co-founder Rao states that the products offered by the brand are 80%-90% ‘Made In India’ and products are manufactured and sold locally.
However, in order to pull the business off, a supplier network had to be created which, Rao mentions to be a very difficult task. Suppliers were not completely open to the idea of working with e-commerce platforms as they were uncomfortable with modernisation. Some of them had previously worked with some private companies and were sadly disappointed by their services.
In retrospect, modernisation could technically benefit these suppliers a lot more as the reach of their product is suddenly not limited to their shop.
Most Indians live in non-metro cities of India and the shopping behaviour of middle and lower-income group of consumers is different. The company mentions to have understood the loopholes and little nuances of the target market and this will help them focus on minimum cost-maximum impact model.