Simple-to-use tech platform helps Meesho penetrate India's hinterlands

Meesho said sellers & buyers from tier 2-3 cities and rural India are finding value in the platform's ease of operations and technologies customised as per their unique needs

Shaan Ansari, who is based in Panipat, Haryana, had to drop out of school after Covid-19 pandemic brought his father’s handloom business to a halt. The 19-year-old is now reviving the family business by manufacturing doormats and selling them on Meesho. The manufacturing unit is now able to ship hundreds of orders on the e-commerce firm every day.

Ansari is one among those many sellers from tier-2 and tier-3 cities and rural India, who came onboard Meesho during the pandemic, which accelerated the shift towards e-commerce as more consumers opted to shop online with greater frequency. Meesho, since then, has been tapping these sellers, as well as customers, in the deepest corners of the country. These places include Daman and Diu, Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir, Una in Himachal Pradesh, Nagamangala in Karnataka, Jowai in Meghalaya, and Mount Abu in Rajasthan.

The products sell in categories such as women's fashion, kidswear, small appliances and electronic accessories, personal care and home decor, mostly unbranded.

Vidit Aatrey, Founder and CEO, Meesho, with Panipat-based seller, Shaan Ansari

“We currently have over 700,000 sellers registered on the platform, with nearly half of them operating only on Meesho,” said Lakshminarayan Swaminathan, CXO, supply growth at Meesho.

The company, backed by SoftBank, is competing with big players like Amazon, Flipkart, Reliance’s JioMart and Tata.

Swaminathan said 61 per cent of the seller base came from tier 4+ regions of India in April 2022.

"The opportunity is huge. Of the 700 million active internet users in India, only 216 million transact online. There is a large chunk of people in tier 2+ cities who do not transact online. Meesho wants to bring these potential customers into the e-commerce fold. It has already reached over 100 million transacting users in the last one year. Customers from small cities and towns like Deodar, Malegaon, Port Blair, Amaravathi, and Bikaner account for 80 per cent of all shoppers," he added.

Since April 2021, Meesho’s seller base has grown nearly 9x to 700,000. The company said it is finding value in the platform’s ease of operations and technologies customised as per their unique needs. It also said the company's seller-friendly policies such as zero commission and zero penalties are also playing a role.

“Our understanding of the challenges that small business owners face, while moving from offline to online, has helped us build a platform that has solved for ease of use,” said Swaminathan. “We have made it (platform) a lot simpler. There are fewer steps and it is easy to understand. The user interface and user experience are non-intimidating.”

Ease of Use

One such seller who has benefited from this is Om Prakash, the owner of Shiva Readymade in Shikohabad, a city in the Firozabad district of Uttar Pradesh.

He had been running a retail store for more than 30 years. After the Covid-19 outbreak, Prakash pivoted his business model towards e-commerce. Prakash said Meesho’s simple technology have helped catapult his business online and now he receives more than 1,500 orders per month from cities and towns whose names he had never heard before. His wife looks after the packaging of orders.

According to Meesho, it takes less than 12 hours for sellers to be onboard on the platform. The company recently launched an integrated Android unified application for customers and sellers, which is easy to understand and operate. Through this app, sellers can manage their businesses related to order processing, payment tracking and inventory management.

With a compressed size of 14.5 MB, Meesho said it is the lightest e-commerce app in India on the Google Play Store. The company’s focus on rural India has brought up the need for it to function on low-specification devices.  

Besides training videos, the platform offers various tools to help small firms grow their business. One such tool is ‘Price Recommendation’ which uses data science to compare similar categories, products and market comparisons to help sellers determine the right pricing for their products.

Another tool is ‘inventory forecasts’ which help sellers determine their manufacturing cycles based on the demand and supply gamut. There’s a ‘Product Recommendation’ tool which allows sellers to understand which products are fast-moving and should be an area of focus for them. It also predicts product demand to help small businesses strategise better. 'Feed Algorithm’ ensures that every supplier receives visibility on the platform.

“We are using artificial intelligence to provide detailed insights to our sellers on what is working well for them and areas of improvement and market intelligence,” said Swaminathan.

What is also helping Meesho reach out to the remotest regions is the collaboration with multiple third-party partners (3PL), such as Shadowfax, Ecom Express, Delhivery and Xpressbees. The firm is expecting to more than double the number of its shipments to over 1.2 billion through third-party logistics players for FY 2023.  It is already accounting for about 35 per cent of all shipments delivered by national third-party logistics (3PL) players.