And that brings us to the other magic ingredient of Cashify - its buyer network. Go through the Cashify website’s glowing reviews and you will see some praising the higher price they got for the phone than on any other platform. You might think it’s because they are offering a price higher than competitors and putting the expense on their accounts. They are not.
“We don’t take on the responsibility of compensating, or paying Cashify users. Anyway the days of discounting and incentivising are over. We are a cash positive business. We have a network of buyers from across India that will pay the Cashify user for these.”
Creating this network of buyers is part of the plan in organizing the second hand C2B market.
Sources reveal they currently have hundreds of such buyers in every region of India.
Even their acqui-hire, which is less cost intensive than a straight up acquisition, MobiBing, has helped strengthen the buyer network; Cashify already had partnerships with big ecomm players like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Infibeam for buy backs but with MobiBing thanks to its relationship with such physical stores especially in the south, the field network there too has been further strengthened.
Mandeep says they will be looking to raise more money by the end of 2016/early 2017 most likely for investing in technology and buyer network. And it’s likely going to be from existing big name investors Blume Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. “We really are in a good place at the moment and quite comfortable with what we have and happy to be associated with world recognized investor like Bessemer and Blume.”
“Was it difficult to convince them? When you hear the market numbers it’s hard to miss the opportunity here. By 2020, there will be 20 billion dollars worth of phones in India. By 2017, it will be 120 million used smartphones. People are changing their phones every 15 to 16 months as opposed to the days when your Nokia was used for about three years. There are about 600 million Indians waiting to switch devices for example, the shift from a feature phone to a smart phone (which most likely may be a refurbished/second hand device). Mandeep claims that Cashify serves about 25,000 – 30,000 customers a month. That’s about the same number of second hand devices sold on the platform a month. So far investors seem to be liking Cashify’s results and spreading the word. Mandeep says it was Blume Ventures that recommended them to Bessemer.
As things wrap up we ask Mandeep what the final goal for Cashify is. “It’s to become the de facto platform for recommerce”, he says. Recommerce means the online buying and selling of used devices.
The next five to six years will see a huge demand for second hand mobile phones. And after that craze dies out, who knows the next may be second hand wearables and Cashify aims to be ready to recommerce those too.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
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