Flipkart Boosts Local Entrepreneurship
With the onset of the pandemic, several individual entrepreneurs struggled to realise their ambitions and faced logistical on-ground challenges that stalled their businesses to take off. The pandemic further induced a structural shift in the way entrepreneurs conducted business, consumers shopped and persuaded many small and micro businesses to adopt digital commerce to remain profitable.
In an effort to provide opportunities to enterprising Indians to start their own online business with no upfront investment, India’s homegrown e-commerce marketplace, Flipkart, recently launched Shopsy- an app that enables Indians to start their online businesses without any investment.
Backed with the ability to influence local networks, Shopsy allows users to share catalogues of a wide selection of 15 crore products offered by Flipkart sellers, ranging across fashion, beauty, mobiles, electronics and home, among others with potential customers via popular social media and messaging apps. It already has over two lakh users active on the platform.
With Shopsy, Flipkart is aiming to cater to over 25 million online entrepreneurs by 2023, as they reap the benefits of digital commerce.
How It Works?
Users can simply register on the Shopsyapp using their phone numbers and begin their online entrepreneurial journey. Budding entrepreneurs can set up their business as long as they have access to a network of people that trust them, without the hassle of investment, inventory or logistics management.
These users can share catalogues with potential customers via popular social media and messaging apps, place orders on their behalf and earn commissions on the transactions. The commission percentage will vary depending on the category of products being ordered. This platform aims at providing new to digital commerce consumers access to products by simplifying the process through interactions with a trusted person.
Committed to contributing towards creating direct and indirect employment opportunities across the country, Flipkart’s Senior Vice President - Growth and Monetization, Prakash Sikaria says, “Shopsy is launched to further this vision and provide additional earning opportunities for millions of enterprising Indians. Now, anyone from anywhere can start their online business with zero investment. In addition, we are opening up Flipkart's years of e-commerce expertise for Indian entrepreneurs. They can now utilize Flipkart's catalogue, established delivery networks, and infrastructure to bring reliability and speed. These benefits will help them enhance the end consumers' experience, which in turn help them grow their business."
Future Focus
Through a zero-commission marketplace initiative, Flipkart hopes to organise and bring smaller sellers and further enable and amplify the supply of products and catalogues on the platform and spur ecommerce growth across tier 2 cities and towns that have been untouched by digital retail so far.
Today 70% of Flipkart’s customers come from these cities. With Shopsy, Flipkart aims to scale this to 90%. Flipkart believes gamification, along with social commerce features will help it achieve this mission. One such feature is ‘Shop & Earn’, where users will be able to unlock higher incentives on achieving a certain weekly/monthly target. This kind of gamification will further lead to virality and evangelization for fringe ecommerce customers.
Over the last decade, Flipkart has championed several initiatives to unlock value for its customers leveraging tech and innovation. This forms a strong and critical base for the success of a next-generation social commerce platform. Sellers are already leveraging Flipkart’s ad tech platform to complement the zero-commission strategy. Additionally, Flipkart's low-cost logistic network and affordability programs like ‘Flipkart Pay Later’ are two other key levers that would act as game-changing catalysts in the context of social commerce.
Sikaria mentions here, “Our vision with Shopsy is to enable digital commerce for everyone across India. We have received an overwhelming response and are further looking to enable several initiatives on the platform to accelerate growth. Shopsy is growing 100% week on week. The platform is demonstrating the behaviour of a typical social app and virality is starting to kick in. To further expedite this, we aim to bring the best of ecommerce to social commerce as we progress in our journey. The Flipkart Group has been committed to constantly expanding the scope of ecommerce; and Shopsy is an important step in that direction.”
With the onset of the festive season, the platform aims to keep accelerating its growth over the next two months by ramping up features and offerings for Indians who are keen to start their social commerce journey.
