KartRocket.com, a do-it-yourself e-commerce platform for small and medium businesses and retailers, has appointed former eBay official Abhimanyu Lal as its Chief Business Officer.

Lal, who spent about eight years at eBay India in various roles, including in the marketing, category management and strategy departments, was also responsible for strategising business for eBay Philippines and Malaysia. He played a crucial role in turning around the business in those markets.

Entrepreneur A graduate from IIM-Ahmedabad, Lal quit eBay in 2013 to start his own venture, a platform that allowed retailers to create flexible marketing programmes to improve customer loyalty. It provided users with personalised and relevant recommendations about outlets and rewarded them at frequently visited F&B outlets. Despite raising some funds, Lal, who started the venture with two others from Yahoo and Microsoft, had to shut down the venture this year.

At KartRocket, Lal will be responsible for expanding the platform’s merchant base and revenues by at least four times. At present, KartRocket has about 4,000 merchants, who use the company’s services through monthly or annual subscriptions.

KartRocket offers end-to-end e-commerce solutions to help SMEs set up their web presence. It takes care of storefronts, payment gateways, marketplace integrations, and also provides a marketing tool and an integrated shipping solution. The firm’s logistics service provider ShipRocket lets e-tailers manage multi-channel orders from one place.

SME portals Talking to BusinessLine about the business plans, Lal said: “With online players such as Flipkart and Snapdeal looking to increase seller commissions to boost their margins, several small businesses present on their platform are now planning to have their respective online stores and become separate entities. We will see more SMEs, dealing with single or specific products, open their own storefronts going ahead, and we will help them improve their business.”

KartRocket is a SaaS e-commerce enablement product that was launched in July 2013 and has so far raised about $8 million in Series B this year from Bertelsmann India Investments and existing investors, Nirvana Digital India Fund, Nirvana Digital Investment Holding Co Ltd, 500 Startups and Singapore-based Beenext.

The company has been strengthening its leadership team. In April, it had hired Snapdeal’s former Associate Director of Market Development, Rajeev Singh, as the Vice-President of Seller Ecosystem. It also hired Gaurav Gupta of Freecultr as its CTO.

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