Indian fashion brand and online store Zovi raised a funding of $50 million (INR 320 crore) to penetrate further into the Online to Offline (O2O) market with the launch of their app-only marketplace “Little” that will offer consumer lifestyle deals.
After the previous round of funding in which they raised $25 million, the current round is led by Paytm and its existing investors like US-based Tiger Global Management and SAIF Partners, alongside a new investor of big proportion whose identity is not officially disclosed yet.
The company is expected to utilize the raised funds in setting up a huge merchant network structure in the country by hiring right and experienced minds of senior level talent to focus on developing new technology on O2O space and brand building. To cope up with this upcoming massive workload, Zovi is reported to be looking for strengthening its workforce, in technology, product as well as operations sector, from 400 people to one thousand team members and scale up to a total of 50k registered merchants to have at least a million customers in bag by March 2016.
Zovi’s “Little” app-only marketplace will compete with other players in the deals space like MyDala, Groupon and Coupondunia. With the explosion of smartphone growth and internet accessibility to the large consumer base of India, Zovi’s investors like SAIF Partners see enormous potential for “Little” that is aimed at building O2O supply side infrastructure for the booming colossal Indian e-market. The “Little” app will offer over 50k live deals for its lifestyle consumers across 11 cities by March 2016 and also serve as a supply chain for real-time hyper-local deals for its customers across wide array of services including movies, restaurants, salon and spas, travel assistance etc. Besides using its own channels, “Little” will also be using its partner Paytm’s platform to provide the deals as well as provide the option of paying through Paytm’s e-wallet structure.
Besides offering all the deals and conveniences to its customers, “Little” will also function as a discovery and sales platform for the merchants by providing them with a hassle free and real-time platform for marketing their offered services. According to the CEO and co-founder Manish Chopra, “Little” will serve as their “sales partner” to reap in profits by selling their services on its platform and also provide them with a personalized, easy to redeem and real-time base to gain knowledge about customer needs and enable them to respond accordingly with timely notifications regarding relevant deals to in-vicinity customers. The move will facilitate bridging the gaps in Indian deals space, he added.
Paytm for example, its biggest Indian investor, will gain further access in the hyperlocal space which is in the top of its priority list provided its Chinese giant Alibaba backing. With “Little” serving as both deal hunting and discovery platform, the Noida-based Paytm will look to gain more control over entire discovery to delivery chain by investing in Chandigarh based Jugnoo that will ensures last mile hyperlocal delivery and also boarded kirana stores in Bengaluru earlier this year.
With Indian O2O market expected to reach a staggering worth of $64 billion by 2016, “Little” wants to rightly cash in with plans to offer over fifty thousand live deals to hit an expected GMV run of around $170 million with businesses spanning across 11 cities in India by enrolling in huge influx of merchants with over 5000 of them enlisted already. With some skepticism also arising due to slow growth rate of Zovi as branded and hyperlocal marketplaces off late and some experts believing the deal space ecommerce to be outdated, in addition to eminent figures like Danish Ahmad, Yebhi co-founder, quitting to launch Shopsity, a platform to bring together online discovery and offline shopping, it will be interesting to witness the deal space evolution thanks to these newly taken initiatives.
Editor team is specialized in introducing the marketplace content targeting the Indian online sellers. They plan and coordinate to bring the appealing content for the small businesses on how to partner with the e-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart and strategies for improving their online business.
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