 "Shopo looks to surpass Snapdeal in terms of number of sellers this year")
Shopo, the zero-commission marketplace of Snapdeal, which allows anyone to sell online, aims to bring one million amateur sellers online with about 10 million product listings this year. The company this year is looking to clock massive targets that will take it on par with Snapdeal.
“In the next one year, we will be as big as Snapdeal or bigger, both in terms of sellers that we have on the platform. The platform will evolve into a platform similar to TaoBao (an online marketplace owned by Alibaba Group) of China,” said Sandeep Komaravelly, senior vice-president, Shopo.
The six-month old app-based platform currently has about 50,000 sellers with more than three million listings.
While Snapdeal is a managed marketplace for branded and organised products, anyone can become a seller on Shopo. The platform supports sellers by providing them a digitised platform of catalogues and guides them by sharing various data points and analytics around various specifics, and free of cost.
Currently, the e-commerce space is controlled by two basic models — managed marketplace and classifieds model. Shopo bridges the gap in between and looks to be the biggest C2C player in the market.
Snapdeal had taken a leaf out of TaoBao while setting up Shopo. “We wanted to start as a zero-commission marketplace since we wanted to make it hassle-free for our customers to start off. The TaoBao model is also similar,” Komaravelly said.
“We have gone ahead and created a platform wherein sellers are driving their own industry. The sellers do their own merchandising; they figure out the product-layer, they are interacting with prospective customers themselves, etc. Hence, the sellers’ dependence on the platform is lesser compared to other online selling sites. This is important for them because these are not volume-based businesses,” he added.
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Fashion and home categories are the popular ones on Shopo. According to Komaravelly, the company will soon be leading these to other categories like electronics also.
While currently Shopo focuses on driving growth in terms of users and has no immediate plans of monetising, the platform will look at monetisation once it achieves a certain level of growth from avenues such as advertising.
Another player in the segment is Shopmatic. Singapore-headquartered Shopmatic helps entrepreneurs to sell online and has launched its operations in India in October. The company helps manage anyone who wants to sell online tackle the entire process — from enabling them develop their own web store to listing them on marketplaces and social channels to helping them with insights on how to sell online, all at $20 (about Rs 1,300) per month.
Snapdeal is the third largest online retailer in India after Flipkart and Amazon and is valued at $5 billion. It had recently introduced various initiatives for sellers such as Capital Assist, an Snapdeal Ads platform and Sherpalo, among others. While Capital Assist ensures access to capital for SMBs, Snapdeal Ads is a platform for sellers and brands to launch promotional campaigns via online advertisements available on the portal. Sherpalo provides a single window access to all seller services like on-boarding, training, product listing, inventory, order and returns management, advertising, third party services, capital assistance and help centre.