In a move that heralds good news for low budget online sellers, Shopo plans to onboard a million sellers this year. The app-based marketplace currently has 50,000 sellers and three million product listings. Shopo is Snapdeal’s brainchild, which does not charge any commission from its sellers. The company plans to increase the number of listings to ten million.
Sandeep Komaravelly, senior VP of Shopo, says, “In the next one year, we will be as big as Snapdeal or bigger, both in terms of sellers that we have on the platform. The platform will evolve into a platform similar to TaoBao of China.”
Shopo helps amateur sellers sell online by connecting them to buyers through its app. The sign up process is simple, and sellers can start selling right away. Joining is a stress free and document free affair (no PAN, TIN or VAT needed). Sellers can upload their catalogue on the app, and interested buyers can directly connect with the sellers.
Shopo is a good example of a model that falls between the marketplace approach and the classifieds one.
“The sellers do their own merchandising; they figure out the product-layer, they are interacting with prospective customers themselves, etc. Hence, the sellers’ dependence on the platform is lesser compared to other online selling sites,” says Komaravelly.
Small scale sellers have more to rejoice about. The State Bank of India (SBI) has entered into an agreement with Snapdeal to provide the latter’s sellers with quick loans.
SBI chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya pointed out the burning issue in ecommerce, “The biggest challenge for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to raise financing through formal banking is often they don’t have collateral or a long history of financial statements to give confidence to a lender.”
SBI is planning to enter into similar arrangements with other leading online marketplaces like Flipkart, Amazon, and Paytm.
With features and facilities like these, small sellers can find it easier to start selling online and build their business.
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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