Online marketplace ShopClues is looking to expand its seller base and make intra-zonal shipments the norm to speed up deliveries and reduce logistics cost, a move that comes at a time when etailers are seeking to fulfill orders faster than their competitors as discounts take a back seat.
“We are moving towards dividing the country into different cities as opposed to regions for our shipments,” said Radhika Aggarwal, Chief Business officer at ShopClues. “The idea of shipping from within the zone of a customer works perfectly for structured categories. The unstructured category might or might not benefit from this,” she said.
Online marketplace ShopClues drops regional operations, eyes cities for growth. The Gurgaon-headquartered marketplace will work with local courier partners for deliveries within the zone, she said.
Shipping within a zone leads to a cost saving of about 25%, resulting in better margins for the marketplace and prices for the customers. Alibaba-backed marketplace Paytm has also been expanding its online-to-offline shipments across regions to speed up delivery time. ShopClues had last year introduced the concept of neighbourhood market feature, which is currently in the pilot stage in Gurgaon for four-six hour deliveries.
“We are currently at 4 lakh sellers on our platform and plan to increase it to 12 lakh sellers by the end of 2016. This will also improve our regional selections and price range of products, mainly from the tier-2 and 3 markets,” said Aggarwal. The GIC and Tiger Global-backed company has been working towards local outreach to on-board merchants in the southern region and plans to take its e-entrepreneurship business contest live on TV for a limited episode.
The marketplace, valued at $1.1 billion in its last round of funding, is targeting profitability by mid-2017.
Source: The Economic Times
