BROWNTAPE, SELLERWORX HELP SMALL BUSINESSES MANAGE THEIR ONLINE OPERATIONS ACROSS MARKETPLACES

When Browntape got to know that one of the online marketplaces was looking for sellers who retail colourful laptop bags priced between Rs 699 and Rs 999, it immediately passed on the information to its clients.

Firms like Browntape and Sellerworx help small businesses manage their online operations across marketplaces and become active on ecommerce platforms, by providing technical backing, key market information other support. These services also help the marketplaces sign up more active sellers, as most of their current seller base is inactive, with small and medium sellers struggling to stay competitive in a market where challenges range from low margins to complex payment and reconciliation process..

Sellerworx works with 800 sellers on Flipkart, Paytm, Snapdeal, Shopclues, eBay and Amazon and, according to the company, as much as 60% of these sellers are active on the ecommerce platforms. “There has been a large push to onboard a critical mass of SMEs in the last six months,” said Venkat Potluri, a former Flipkart executive who cofounded Sellerworx and is its chief executive. “These businesses typically struggle with issues related to returns (from customers) and payments. It takes an initial period of six to eight months to understand the system.” It is at this stage that their services become critical to small sellers.

Gurpreet Singh, cofounder and CEO of Browntape, said 300 of its 500 clients were active. Indian marketplaces claim to have registered sellers ranging from 50,000 to 2.5 lakh. The percentage of active sellers, though, is a fraction of this. The definition of active seller itself varies across marketplaces.

 “We have over 80,000 sellers on the marketplace and 25-30% of these sellers are active, in terms of having received orders in the last few months,” said Sudhanshu Gupta, associate VP at Paytm. “We don’t simply weed out inactive sellers. We understand that this is a new channel for most of our sellers and that they need assistance in various aspects of online selling.”

 The year-old marketplace is focused on SMEs which provide attractive price points, Gupta said. Tiger Global-backed ShopClues, which has 2.75-lakh merchants registered on the platform, has seen 10,000 merchants processing orders in January 2015 and 35,000 in September. “We define active sellers as those who have four live listings at any given time,” said Chief Business Officer Radhika Aggarwal. Flipkart and Snapdeal, didn’t comment. While sellers pay a subscription fee to the enabler services, marketplaces pay Rs 1,000 to Rs 3,000 per seller on-boarded to sales and marketing agencies or small software companies which help them sign up the seller.