This social commerce platform brings hinterland stores online

The e-commerce segment is quite crowded globally and India is no different. Most of the major markets of the world have the global biggies present with regional and local players also competing for business. 

Mumbai-based CoutLoot, which is built on the lines of China's Taobao, was also aware of the challenges when it started operations in 2016 and realised that it needs to pivot a bit differently to create its niche in a segment, which has large global and domestic players already vying for customer attention. 

Founded by Mahima Kaul and Jasmeet Thind, pivoted to become an 'offline to online social commerce platform' in 2019 for offline sellers spread across the length and breadth of the country.  

"We saw a bigger opportunity (in social commerce) where we could aggregate millions of offline stores throughout India who were already sitting on a ton of supply, had all the upselling sales experience but no demand," says Thind. 

"Hence, we decided to bring e-commerce to these stores sitting in small towns selling very aspirational products at cheap costs," he adds. 

Interestingly, the start-up had recently said that sellers on its platform saw their income grow seven times during the pandemic as the average income rose to ?16,000 in December 2021, much higher than ?2,300 during the start of the pandemic in 2020. It onboarded around three lakh sellers during the pandemic with SKUs growing 14 times in 2021. 

Currently, CoutLoot has more than two lakh active sellers - with total seller base of over six lakh - on its platform with the eclectic mix comprising of home businesses, so-called mom and pop shops and street vendors as well.  

Its app has been downloaded over seven million times and it boasts of over 15 million listings and the venture is targeting 50 million users and 25 lakh sellers in the next 18 months. Further, nearly 70 per cent of the platform's users are from the smaller towns.  

"We're basically penetrating e-commerce's white space in India. The market is over $200billion and all of it offline, there's so much potential to unlock sales and growth for these small 10X10 shops scattered all over India," says Thind.  

"The sellers know how to sell. We've just enabled it in a bigger way with the use of video, chat and an e-commerce suite that works on a low-end mobile phone," he added. 

CoutLoot is not just a shopping platform but also uses technology and AI tools to provide payments and supply chain services and those are also some of the services from which it makes money too. It also makes money by subscriptions and markups from its B2B vertical wherein sellers are directly connected to the factories. 

Interestingly, CoutLoot offers its users a set of features or services that are quite common during an offline shopping experience. 

Take for example the 'automatic bargaining' feature that allows the buyer and seller to bargain during an online shopping experience. This feature provides the buyer a pre-set bargain price within a chat box. The buyer can then select and quote a favourable price, which he or she thinks is fair for the product. More importantly, one can even bargain in a local language and not necessarily English or Hindi. 

The start-up recently launched a video commerce feature as well that helps small sellers to engage with potential buyers using short online videos. Further, the video story is entirely user-generated content and customised to showcase the sellers' journey. 

"With the introduction of auto bargaining and videos, we've already seen a 3X increase in store engagement and a 2X increase in conversion," says Thind. 

Currently the platform, which employs over 130 people, registers monthly transactions totalling ?60cr and is looking to scale and break even in the next three years. 

In terms of funding, the start-up has raised over $10 million through two rounds that saw investors like Venture Catalysts, Ameba Capital, SOSV, 9Unicorns, Artha India Ventures, Samyakth Capital and Astarc Ventures among others. 

"E-commerce in India isn't going to be driven by Amazon or Flipkart in the next few years, it's going to be led by small corner shops as the consumer segment matures further with Internet adoption. With the current growth we should be adding another 200 people to our team by the end of 2022 with over 25 lakh stores and an increase in average store sale to ?30,000 per month," says Thind. 

Also read: BharatPe ramps up POS business by 25X, fastest-ever scale up

Also read: Microsoft to help SMBs develop digital skills with new initiative