Online marketplaces realise the importance of retaining sellers, especially during a cash crunch. This is why they are on a mission to provide more than a helping hand in the finance department. Flipkart recently ran a pilot project to enable 250 of its merchants to get instant loans, which amounted to Rs. 50 Lakhs. It now plans to roll out the programme to its 80,000 sellers. Alibaba backed, Paytm also announced that it aims to dole out loans to empower 500 million Indians by 2020. Amazon, among others have similar incentives going on.
The latest news is that ecommerce marketplace, Snapdeal is planning to crank up its capital assist programme a few notches by dishing out $1billion worth of loans to it loyal 200,000 army of sellers by 2018. It envisages an average of 1,000 sellers availing of the scheme every 3 months and has developed a prudent analytical system to signal if sellers are about to default on their repayments.
“We are targeting a total loan disbursal of Rs 6,000 crore by the end of 2017-18. We would do the financing with the help of participation of 22 banks and non-banking financial company (NBFC) partners. We are financing the loans 100 per cent through banks and NBFC partners. While 70 per cent of the loans are for less than Rs 10 lakh, which helps aid a large number of our smaller sellers to grow and expand their business, 30 per cent of loans are for above Rs 10 lakh,” said Vijay Ajmera, senior vice-president, capital assist, Snapdeal.
Snapdeal’s Capital assist programme was launched last year with great success for granting pre-approved loans. In October, the online marketplace had asserted that it planned to arrange Rs. 1,000 crore worth of loans for its sellers by March 2016. The latest development is an even more ambitious increase on that figure. Snapdeal also offers the instant loan facility for its sellers and plans to work in tandem with the government to help more merchants in the villages scale up.
“Though pre-approved loans are common place for individuals, this was the first time they were rolled out for SMEs in India. Under this programme, working capital collateral free loans amounting to Rs 1 lakh to Rs 1 crore are availed. The loan offers were made on the basis of sellers’ previous sales history with Snapdeal,” stated Ajmera.
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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