Top-level exits at ShopClues.com

Two top executives at online marketplace ShopClues.com are on their way out from the company.

Nitin Kochhar, Senior Vice-President for Categories and Marketplace, and Raunak Raheja, Director of Category Management, have quit the Gurgaon-based marketplace.

A LinkedIn search indicated that Kochhar has already joined logistics start-up Rivigo as Business head for Zoom. Raheja is likely to join Flipkart in Mumbai. However, Raheja’s designation on LinkedIn has not been updated yet.

Kochhar joined ShopClues in 2015 from Flipkart, where he was a Director of Category; Raheja joined in the same year after quitting as Head for Retail Imports at eBay and was responsible for growth of categories and profitability at ShopClues.

Responding to a query, a ShopClues spokesperson said, “Nitin had decided to move out of e-commerce and Raunak moved out of NCR for family reasons.”

Cash crunch

Both the senior-level exits also come at a time, when ShopClues is caught in a fight between Amazon and Flipkart, which raised a massive round of $2 billion from SoftBank last year. However, the company has managed to raise a mere $1-million funding from Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures this week. It’s a bridge round and ShopClues is understood to have obtained 1,027 equity shares from its US parent Clues Network Inc to be allotted to Unilazer, against this funding.

Besides a severe cash crunch, ShopClues, which counts Tiger Global, Nexus Venture Partners and GIC as its major investors, is also grappling with sluggish growth. According to data and research firm Tofler, the company’s total revenues grew marginally by 5 per cent at ₹188 crore in 2017 as against a two-fold jump the previous year. However, the company’s losses declined by 13 per cent to ₹332 crore during FY17.

ShopClues has been venture funded and has raised more than $200 million so far from investors and is valued at $1 billion.

One of the reasons for the slow growth, experts feel, could be Amazon and Flipkart’s entry and focus in the smaller cities, where ShopClues has a stronghold.

However, ShopClues is not deterred by these challenges, and said the e-commerce is growing exponentially and is not competing with Flipkart or Amazon in their space.

“Unlike them, ShopClues is more like the online version of Chandni Chowk, where you can expect to get everything at cheaper rates. It is more like an online intermediary. Only by remaining true to our vision to stay focussed on the hinterland in the last six years have we built the enviable scale that ShopClues boasts of now,” said its founder Sanjay Sethi.