CoutLoot: A digital platform for bargain hunters across Bharat and India

The firm allows buyers and sellers pan-India to haggle over price and terms in as many as 12 languages on chat platforms, is now planning video-enabled bargaining too

Any urban dude will tell you what a chandelier is. And if you wanted to buy one online, you'd simply go to Amazon or Flipkart, wouldn't you? But what if someone in a tier-2 or 3 city, not half as tech- or English-savvy, if you will, wanted to buy the same thing? Chances are that he may not even be able to get the spelling of the product right, let alone getting it delivered to his doorstep.

This is where Jasmeet Thind, 30, an engineer from Mumbai who was previously with Unilever and Godrej, and Mahima Kaul, 28, ex-AC Nielsen (now known as the Neilsen Company) exec spotted an opportunity. The two, who were together in engineering college, started a C2C platform in late 2016 called Coutloot, a portmanteau of the English word 'couture' (fashion) and Hindi word 'Loot' (steal deal) that essentially catered to the small-town guy, who would simply ask for the 'Jhummar' he wanted without struggling to communicate his need. Oh BTW, in case you didn't know it, 'Jhummar' is the Hindi word for chandelier.

Amazon, Flipkart and others are also making headway in the vernacular space. "The difference," says Thind, "is that none of them facilitates a conversation between buyer and seller, allowing them to bargain on price." 

The business model

Coutloot is essentially a social commerce platform that helps small offline shops sell online and acquire the custom of the value-conscious buyer. It list non-MRP, unbranded local market products across fashion, electronics, home decor, sports and other boxed categories that make up for 75 per cent of India's retail sector at present and is the total addressable market for Coutloot.

Coutloot's best-performing sellers come from smaller towns like Nagaon in Assam, Basai near Gurugram, Korba in Chhattisgarh, Surat in Gujarat, and Ludhiana in Punjab. Its platform provides business opportunities to over 500,000 offline retailers, mom-and-pop stores, home sellers, the tiniest of kiosks and even street hawkers. It has over 20 million listings on its app, which has been downloaded over 11 million times.

Thind says 20 per cent of the total seller base is street hawkers and that CoutLoot's logistics partners do the quality control. Returns are under 7 per cent since the buyer confirms the order and initiates the payment, which is reconciled in the seller's account three days after the buyer receives the product.

Most of the buyers and sellers are from tier-2, 3 and 4 centres, where the participants bargain through the chat feature and use colloquial languages to buy and sell products. So you wanted a teacup, you'd probably ask for a 'pyaala' on the platform if you'rr dealing in Hindi. In fact, you can exchange thoughts in as many as 12 local languages.

Thind claims the return percentage is about 7-8 per cent, and much lower than even that of the big e-commerce players such as Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra. He adds that he is in any case not competing with them, nor even with Meesho, which is more akin to Flipkart, but at a different level, as Coutloot has created its own niche. Its closest competitors are Instagram Shops, and Facebook Marketplace.

CoutLoot makes money on the logistics it facilities, advertising revenue generated by sellers, subscriptions and markups from its B2B vertical, where it connects its sellers directly to factories for supply.

In case a particular vendor consistently does not meet the norms set out by Coutloot, he is tracked based on his order fulfilment history, activity on the app, rating by buyers and a ranking on the app, based on which if a seller defaults is barred from transacting on the platform.

Thind says fashion is the largest category that sells on the platform, followed by electronics, electronic accessories, home and home decor. Most of the products are non-brand and available at low price points--the kind of merchandise you'd get in the typical Indian bazaar.

Currently the platform facilitates Rs 60 crore of gross merchandise value a month and is looking to scale now and break even by 2025. Over 620,000 vendors across genres sell on CoutLoot.

How it all started

"After Mahima and I graduated, our first jobs were in the consumer sector only. We had been friends even after college and while I was in HUL and Mahima in Nielsen, we stumbled upon this idea of buying and selling of used goods--mostly apparel. We knew about Poshmark and realised there weren’t any Indian players in this segment. So we thought of quitting our respective jobs and started CoutLoot in 2016 as a platform for seconds," says Thind. 

In the following year, the enterprise received $250,000 seed funding from Venture Catalysts, Artha India Ventures, Samyakth Capital and others. It was essentially a C2C model, much like Quikr or Olx, and doubled up as a garage sale online. But it didn't really take off, as neither the buyer nor the seller evinced much interest in the platform.

Thankfully the duo hadn't burnt much cash.

Says Thind: "About a year-and-a-half down the line, we realised something like this might not be able to scale up in India, because the average consumer has a tendency to frown on seconds and garage sales which they regard as hand-me-downs. The consumer typically want to spend his money on something brand new, and with a semblance of show-off value, howsoever small."

After trying hard to breathe life into the venture, Thind and Kaul decided to go for a complete overhaul, pivoting the enterprise to an offline-to-online, or O2O social commerce platform for offline sellers in 2019.

The duo already had a few thousand local sellers, whom they notified about their plan to pivot into a buying and selling platform for local non-MRP products. "With a team of 40 people, we worked on the transition process and in less than three months we had pivoted and rebranded our business. The entire marketing communication was changed and everything was handled by our internal team of techies, sales and marketing folks," says Thind.

He adds that the company's existing investors pumped in another $100,000 in 2018 and then in 2020, Ameba Capital, SOSV, Venture Catalysts invested around $3 million. The firm received its latest round of $8 million funding last August.

A great deal of the marketing was done on Facebook and Instagram, along with Google Ads influencer and meme marketing. They also did TV ads. "We spent Rs 25 lakh per month for three months," says Thind, adding that they never did any face-to-face marketing. "In 2020, we raised funds and then Covid hit so there was no chance of doing any on the ground marketing. We already had a seller and user base, which we capitalised on to expand through referral marketing," he says.

Thind and Kaul also used Pincode marketing and WhatsApp marketing to good effect, focusing on a location-based guerrilla strategy to get the first set of roughly 5,000 sellers.

More than 80 per cent of these were small-time sellers and shopkeepers who had never done any business out of their immediate locality. CoutLoot helped them scale up and sell across the country with simple features. "Most had heard about e-commerce but were not eligible or had the bandwidth to sell on large marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart etc. We empowered these small-time sellers through our CoutLoot app. All they had to do is downloads the app, upload photos of the products and start selling," he says. 

"Initially we focused on high supply markets that are also the manufacturing hubs such as Surat, Tirupur, Ludhiana, Agra, Jaipur. The sellers from these places had access to the manufacturers directly. They buy in bulk and sell it on CoutLoot without a price tag."

The road ahead

CoutLoot has had many VCs such as Ameba Capital, SOSV, 9Unicorns, Astarc Ventures, Artha India Ventures and others, and has raised $8 million in capital over two rounds. The last round raised was a Pre-Series A round.

CoutLoot has over 130 employees based out of their Mumbai HQ. CoutLoot is sharply focussed on serving markets and sellers in small towns in India to sell online and scale that to over 50 million users and 2.5 million in the next 18 months.

The platform saw an upsurge in traffic, orders and overall userbase increase during the pandemic where majority of their sellers transitioned from an offline business to selling on Coutloot. CoutLoot saw an 7x jump in GMV in the last year alone.

Thind says: "A small shopkeeper cannot sell an Amazon or Flipkart because he would in all probability not even have a computer, let alone being basically tech-savvy. He is unlikely to have tax certificates either. These and other problems prevent him from expanding business on the bigger platforms, which are vendor agnostic. On the larger platforms, typically the top 10 per cent of vendors would end up cornering 80-90 per cent of overall sales, whereas on Coutloot 40-50 per cent of the sellers would do probably account for 70 per cent of the sales."

He says if one actually downloads the app, one will be able to see where the shops are located and the wares they sell. Some sellers are also promoting their stores on video. You could also bargain, which something consumers in small-town India typically do.

Thind adds: "E-commerce penetration is still less than 15 per cent of India's internet usage. So there's a big gap in the market and we thought it would be a good idea to empower small local shops and get them online. This would  automatically get the right set of buyers online to purchase from them with more confidence, because there is two-way communication here, which isn't the case in Amazon, Flipkart and such like."