E-commerce major Snapdeal invests $ 100 million (about Rs 665 crore) and relaunch Shopo with the aim to expand new venture and make it into a one million seller-strong platform. Shopo is a mobile-only platform where one can chat, buy and sell anything. It was launched with the aim to bring small and medium businesses (SMBs) together which cannot be registered on bigger e-commerce portals. It was developed by a 14-member team and allowed new entrepreneurs to list their products without submitting any documents and avoid long verification procedures. Using these platform individuals can sell anything from cakes to jewellery.
They simply can put a photo of their products and list it for sale in Shopo. It charges no fees or commission for its use by individuals. Using this app the buyers can strike a bargain with the seller on chat and sellers can make time-bound offers and transactions even offline.
Kunal Bahl, the co-founder and CEO of Snapdeal proposed that they have already
20,000 shops registered on the Shopo platform and they will get about 1 million more shops registered within a year. He added that $ 100 million will be invested by the company for improving their technology and building up their brand image. They are also planning to build up a new community called ‘Shopo angels’ to drive more consumer engagement.
The main idea of Shopo was to bring online as many sellers as possible. For this it offers various SMBs to improve their logistics and payment gateways. The sellers can use this facility like any other courier service and make their selling experience a hassle-free one.
Inspired by Alibaba Taobao which provides a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores to cater the needs of their local consumers in China, Bahl said that Shopo will concentrate more on avenues like advertising to increase their revenues.
