Snapdeal's Shopo gets 1 lakh sellers on board, plans to monetise and more

Lately, there seems to be a buzz around chatting platforms, chatbots and how it seems to be becoming the most preferred choice of communication. But chatting in e-commerce space is nothing new, and many have seen this coming. Last year in July, we heard about Shopo. It is a Snapdeal-owned platform for small and medium sellers, which allows buyers and sellers to chat via its WhatsApp-like interface. Sandeep Komarvelly, CEO, Shopo calls it a destination for small and medium sellers of the country, who are looking for an identity online, but are clueless about how to do so. Shopo was built to bring small sellers online and make the experience seamless for both users and sellers. For achieving this, it first decided to strike out all the possible barriers in doing so. One such was commission on sale. Apart from setting up a platform and helping with payment gateways, pickup mechanism and other resources that these sellers may need, Shopo also introduced a zero-commission policy. “95 percent sellers don’t find a platform to go online and start selling. So, it needed a commitment from our end to provide resources,” he said. The idea was to empower these sellers and today in less than a year, Shopo has 1,00,000 sellers onboard, Komarvelly tells us. Now, it aims at 1 million sellers by the end of the year. However, it is the peer to peer chat that still remains central to the app, allowing users to reach out to sellers, probably bargain, sort a way of delivery and get the desired product. Wait, then why not integrate it within Snapdeal? Komarvelly explains that fundamentally the audience for both is very different. While Shopo is open to all, it is more beneficial for small or individual sellers. It helps find unique goods not found anywhere, rather than big brands, who already have options such as Snapdeal. “We have negligible sellers who overlap,” he points out. So, it is a platform that aims at products not very easy to discover and buy, non-branded or non-commoditised products. Moreover, these sellers can use their own policies, and all this can be decided by the seller and buyer on chat. Shopo is a team of roughly 40-50 people, who are helping cater to people across cities. The company has spent time getting a slick interface, building tools that sellers find convenient and users find engaging, and now it is ready to take the next leap. Shopo plans to start monetizing this year. “We will look at monetization options by financial year end – this could be from multiple avenues – including advertising, value added services for sellers,” he said. It is definitely in the pipeline for 2016, Komarvelly tells us. However, this may not mean that it will move away from the zero-commission plan and rather looking for other means of monetising. Talking about the recent buzz around chatbots, he feels that Shopo is a platform wherein the seller would be the best person to talk about his products than a chatbot. Also, we wonder how good a chatbot would be at handling price negotiations.