Vimal Jain, a jewellery store owner, was desperate. The sales at his store, Shubham Jewellery, located in Bengaluru’s commercial hub Chickpet, had dropped by almost 70% since the government scrapped the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. Most of his transactions, which used to take place in cash, had disappeared.
Jain decided the only way to deal with this change was to go where the customers were — online. Now, Jain sells his jewellery pieces over the internet from his own website.
Bengaluru’s Urban Piper, which helped Jain set up his website, has seen a dramatic increase in the number of signups. “We used to receive 5-10 requests a month but that has risen to 10-15 requests a day,” says co-founder Saurabh Gupta.
Other startups, like Goodbox, Shopmatic, NowFloat, and Kraftly, who help small retailers and entrepreneurs set up online storefronts, have also started seeing brisk business. Goodbox says a supermarket chain reluctant to join the platform came on-board after demonetisation.
“It hardly takes 5 minutes to create a mini-app and it’s a self-help platform. We’ve seen our transactions and registered users doubling since demonetisation,” says Abey Zachariah, Co-Founder, Goodbox. The number of retailers coming on the platform has also gone up from 15 a day to 200 since the liquidity crisis started.
Anurag Avula’s Shopmatic, which manages the websites of 20,000 small and medium enterprises, launched a free app this week on which a seller can create her own e-commerce website in a few steps. Already, some 6,000 retailers have used the service.
Gurugram-based Kraftly has seen 15,000 of its dormant registered users springing to action since demonetisation. Out of Kraftly’s 40,000 small-home entrepreneurs, only 25,000 were active before. Now, even the inactive sellers have started expanding their existing catalogues, says Saahil Goel, co-founder and CEO of Kraftly .
Pankaj Makkar, Managing Director, Bertelsman Indian Investments, one of the investors in e-commerce solutions firm Kartrocket, thinks there will be an upswing in the following months too. “Even as cash becomes sufficiently available, the behaviour change to use cards more often will remain and most small businesses will have an incentive to come online,” he said.
NowFloats’ Jasminder Singh Gulati agreed. “More small time retailers even from tier-2 cities like Ajmer, Coimbatore, and Kolhapur are now open to the online platform,” he said.
Source: Times of India
Image Courtesy: ETRetail
