State of e-Commerce in India
With e-commerce industry completely shifting to marketplace model from inventory model in the past, a situation of chaos like never before is happening in India. All these marketplaces (likes of Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon) talk big numbers and are on a spree to add thousands of business owners/vendors to start selling and these vendors are getting registered on the marketplaces without going through the “role book” per say. Rules being
- Once the order is confirmed by a buyer and he chooses to cancel it within minutes of ordering, marketplace commission and logistics fee is still deducted from a seller’s account.
- A buyer’s order gets delayed due to delay on the logistics front, the penalty is still born by the seller.
These are just a few of a big list of policies that a seller needs to go through before he signs up but that is not done, obviously because e-commerce is way too lucrative to be going into details. There is a burning desire in marketplace to outsmart each other in discount race, which, again are borne by the sellers. The result being, vendors sign up but fallout within 2-3 months because of the bad taste in mouth due to multiple factors including:
- Marketplace commissions unclear and not standard across all marketplace
- Return time being as long as 30 days- people send back used products and give negative ratings on top of that as well.
- Some products return damaged. At times, a completely different product returns and sometimes an empty box too. (even if you go claim for the same on the marketplace, it takes ages)
- Payment cycle is not fixed. Penalties are unclear.
The plight of merchants doing business online with various marketplaces is not hidden from anybody. For a seller, who may/may not have an offline shop along with the online shop, managing all this in detail is a cumbersome task. Either they hire a team force of 4-5 people who take all the profit (if any) in salaries or they run it for some time, incur losses, get negative ratings- fall out or are blocked by the marketplace team.
EasyEcom genesis
A little before this marketplace chaos was to begin, Punit Gupta ( IIT-G graduate and GA Tech postgraduate) was working on his second venture PriceCheckIndia.com. PriceCheckIndia got huge traction early on and was getting more than a million unique visitors every month. Next natural business expansion was to enable transactions on PriceCheckIndia. By this time, it was evident to Punit that entire e-Commerce market was moving towards marketplace model in India. After doing trials to enable transactions he figured that there was a big elephant in the room that no one wanted to talk about i.e. participants of the marketplace model weren’t as sophisticated and educated to handle the complexities of online selling. A fast booming e-commerce sector which pushes customers to buy because of huge discount offers, also sees returns as high as 30%. The participating sellers who already struggle with getting their products listed, keeping inventory up to date, processing orders; also have to struggle with handling huge amount of returns and sorting out payments.
Punit teamed up with his co-founders Swati Jindal and Jitesh Advani to put a serious effort to solve the issue, giving birth to EasyEcom. Today, EasyEcom is an end to end platform to enable SMEs to sell their products on online marketplaces such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon etc.
EasyEcom is an e-commerce enabler which provides complete end to end solution to its sellers starting with product listing to order imports through a marketplace integrated dashboard to reconciling their accounts which is unique in the market. EasyEcom marketplace integrated dashboard is loaded with analytical reports, premium services to streamline and optimize the online business of mid-tier and bottom-tier sellers. The hard work is paying off and resulting into happy sellers. EasyEcom is quickly becoming the preferred partner/platform to do business online!
EasyEcom growth story
Like every other startup in india, EasyEcom too, started from a small apartment in Feb’ 2014. Founders are a group of experienced and passionate entrepreneurs coupled with a dedicated team having backgrounds from e-commerce companies such as Flipkart. “Our beta version quickly won our first few customers by delivering unique solution and extraordinary results and the referrals started pouring in” says Swati.
By July’14, the seed funds arrived and the first version of EasySoft was released and since then there has been no looking back. The sellers are already clocking orders at a run rate of $7 Mn per year on major marketplaces. EasyEcom’s proprietary technology (EasySoft) has helped hundreds of sellers across 12 cities to scale their business manifolds in a very short span of time.
Road Ahead
E-Commerce is huge and has its own ecosystem. To grow its customers and scale their business faster, EasyEcom has tied up with over 55 partners in over 12 cities to deliver the best of results. EasySoft technology not just empowers the seller but also integrates its partners to ensure a consistent service and End-to-End solution for every seller. More than 85% (more than 100,000) of the total online sellers are currently either inactive or doing very few transactions, ultimately defeating the whole purpose of marketplace being in place. EasyEcom aims to solve this and maximize their exposure to online retail. In order to achieve that target, EasyEcom is aggressively hiring best talent across all the verticals. EasyEcom is the choice solution provider for majority of online sellers in Bangalore and has been growing at the rate of average 20% months over months. Next step in the process is to expand pan India and establish a market leader position. The ultimate aim of EasyEcom is to turn the entire process of listing-sales-payment cycle a pleasant experience for sellers!
More reads:
Read about Study: Digitally engaged SMEs may grow up to 27%
Read about How Bizongo is setting business of “Industry Giants and SMEs’ on go through its online platform?
Read about ProfitBooks – The Digital Accountant for SMEs !
