In India, it’s a very common practice for SMBs to use WhatsApp groups to keep customers updated on new products and to close transactions over chats. Marketing to your customers through WhatsApp has inherent limitations: every new product requires a separate notification, and pictures of products sent through WhatsApp eat up the memory on a customer’s phone. These two limitations cause loyal customers to leave the merchant’s WhatsApp group because the interactions are annoying. Some merchants send more than 150 messages to customers per day.
With
Meesho, communication between merchants and customers is streamlined and less intrusive, which increases the lifetime value of a customer. Additionally, customers can’t pay for items over WhatsApp. With Meesho, buyers can stay updated on product updates in a nonintrusive way and they can purchase products with all major payment methods offered in India.
Apart from $120K from Y Combinator, Meesho has raised an angel round from VH Capital, Kashyap Deorah, Rajul Garg, Arjun/ Rohan Malhotra, Maninder Gulati, Abhishek Jain and Jaspreet Bindra in India. It provides a complete set of mobile tools that allows merchants in India to manage their eCommerce businesses on WhatsApp and Facebook. In short, Meesho is Shopify for small businesses in India, who currently use WhatsApp and Facebook.
The company has 8 members in its team (including the founders), based out of Bangalore. Most of them are engineers. Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal are the co-founders. They were batchmates in college at IIT. Sanjeev has worked as a software developer at Sony, Tokyo while Vidit has worked as a Supply Chain Engineer at ITC and Sales Manager at InMobi.
How does it work? Say you're a boutique owner in India. You create a store on Meesho's mobile app by linking your business's Facebook page. Meesho automatically creates an online store for you that can be managed from Meesho’s mobile app. You can update products, edit the store, manage orders etc. Sellers can share these links on Facebook and WhatsApp with customers. These customers can easily browse through the product collection and initiate a chat anytime with the seller. Even the sellers get realtime updates of the shop visitors and the products they are visiting and even they can start a chat on WhatsApp with these customers right from the app.
When the sales is closed, the seller can share a payment link on WhatsApp and accept payments by all major methods in India - Credit Card/ Debit Card and Wallets. Sellers can keep their customers updated with new products on Facebook Messenger using Meesho’s chatbot automated updates.
Traction Meesho has more than 1000 businesses on its app. It has also seen consistent growth in the transaction volume over the past 3 months.
Market Size & Opportunity India has 50 million registered small businesses. Currently, about 1 million of them are online, mostly selling through Facebook and WhatsApp. It is expected that 10 million of these businesses will be online by 2020 (as per Google BCG report). Indian commerce market size as of 2016 is $600 bn which is expected to grow to $1.3 tn dollar by 2020. SMBs account for 90% of the total commerce market in India (BCG KPMG India report). Meesho will become the platform for these businesses to run their stores online on Facebook and WhatsApp effectively.
