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After establishing a presence in tier II and III cities over the last five years, e-commerce company ShopClues.com plans a strong rural push, as it seeks to onboard the next 100 million customers onto the online bandwagon.
With $700 million in revenue run rate, ShopClues ships three million products a month from a selection of five crore listed products from 500,000 merchant sellers, with 25 million registered buyers on its site.
Earlier this year, ShopClues entered the billion-dollar league in valuation when it raised a fresh round of funds led by sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte Ltd with participation from existing investors Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Going deep “Rural is our next big focus area, which is more of a B2B initiative that we kicked off recently with our partnership with StoreKing, an assisted e-commerce player with a strong rural focus.
“With StoreKing, we will have access to deep rural pockets in south India with low internet penetration, such as Kollam in Kerala, Theni and Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu and Tumkur in Karnataka, where we will work with kirana stores, mobile recharge points and small shop owners, which form a part of 16,000 StoreKing franchisees, to help walk-in customers shop on ShopClues,” Radhika Ghai Aggarwal, co-founder and Chief Business Officer, ShopClues, told BusinessLine .
The company, which currently ships to 30,000 pin codes, has partnered with Payworld, another assisted e-commerce player. Together, they are running pilots in 52 stores in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which will be scaled up to 18,000 stores next month.
Pilots with two more assisted e-commerce firms, which have national reach, have been initiated, Aggarwal said. She added that the target is to reach 3,00,000 offline, high-traffic, small stores in rural India over the next 18 months.
“Seventy per cent of the company’s orders come from tier II and III markets today, which combined with the order inflow from rural markets will contribute to 80 per cent of our revenue in 18 months,” said Aggarwal, who is confident of achieving $1.3 billion in annualised GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) by March 2017.
ShopClues on Wednesday unveiled AdZone, a self-service solution that helps merchants promote products using native and custom ads on its managed marketplace platform.
AdZone Created in partnership with C1X, a leading online advertising technology firm, AdZone allows merchant sellers to boost the visibility of their listed products, maximise product views and sell more, through a transparent bidding system with a minimum bid of ₹1,000 for a campaign that can be seen on desktop, as well as on mobile app/site.
Merchant sellers can pay per click or impressions; track and manage the performance of the ad campaign via the Store Manager on the AdZone dashboard.
“Ads contribute to 10 per cent of our revenue today. With AdZone, we are targeting to increase it to 35 per cent,” said Sanjay Sethi, co-founder and CEO, ShopClues.
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