benefitsPLUS, India’s most dynamic closed-group ecommerce website has now entered the open B2C space by investing in Koovs.com today, one of the fastest growing daily deal – group buying internet sites which already boasts over 400k registered users.
benefitsPLUS only recently announced its acquisition of snowball eRetail services, at this pace it seems its truly closing the entire ecosystem by owning different segments of the market.
Commenting on the acquisition Paul Shoker, Founder & CEO, benefitsPLUS said “After establishing ourselves as an exciting B2E player, venturing into B2C was a natural and obvious extension, giving us automatic leverage. We want to take the online shopping experience to the next level and will invest $3 million on marketing, technology scaling and on new hires to strengthen our value proposition for consumers. We will continue to grow and take a large bite of the ecommerce economy to become a significant player in the daily deals space too”.
“This partnership will help us broaden our reach in the B2C space with an established partner who has the expertise and passion to match our own ambition. The current management team fit in very well into our thinking and has managed to do a great job. The investment we have outlined for Koovs.com will allow them to accelerate to the next level. It is inventible that this daily deal market will consolidate and we are simply taking advantage of our strength and for those that want to be part of our journey.” added Shoker.
“Together benefitsPLUS and Koovs.com have built an excellent win-win coalition. This collaboration is expected to improve our market competitiveness in the fast growing online daily deal arena. It will enable us to accelerate our transformation by leveraging benefitsPLUS marketing/operational expertise. Our objective is to be a top 3 player in India and have offers and deals on a national basis.” said Rajesh Kamra; Co-Founder & Managing Director Koovs.com.
According to industry research, the upward spiral of the ecommerce graph in India is becoming most visible in one segment – Group buying. Consumers can get a better price if they purchase in greater numbers; and that is the basic premise of group buying websites that have emerged in India and in other parts of the world in the past year. The sites are eyeing India’s rapidly growing retail industry, which almost doubled between 2005 and 2010. It has grown from .7,700 billion to .13,542 billion in that period, according to data sourced from Euromonitor. The rise in group buying has been propelled by the growth of e-commerce and the increased spending power of India’s middle classes.
