Mobile Only Wydr Targets One Stop B2B Marketplace
Wydr is an online B2B marketplace whose sole aim is to bring brands, wholesalers, importers and retailers on one single platform with a vision to aggregate the unorganised and fragmented Indian wholesale market. With estimates putting B2B e-commerce opportunity at $300 billion it is estimated that the market will expand to $700 billion by 2020.
How did Wydr come to be?
Our name Wydr has been adapted from the word ‘wider.’ We are an innovative B2B marketplace whose sole aim is to bring brands, wholesalers, importers and retailers on one single platform with a vision to aggregate the unorganised and fragmented Indian wholesale market. The concept came to light while dealing with several brands and wholesalers during my past stints with various companies. I came to identify several gaps and pain points in the business of wholesale buying and selling. I realized that regressive aspects like broken up distribution chain, cost involved in setting up a sales team across the country, low trust market, payment safety issues and logistics etc were hindering the B2B market from reaching its true potential.
Additionally, the fact that offline retail is and will continue to have a lion's share of the retail business was why I saw immense potential in taking the B2B market online.
Our overriding aim is to become a platform of choice for wholesale buyers and sellers by bringing in the best online innovations that makes wholesale buying and selling easier, more efficient and transparent, eventually connecting Indian Wholesale buyers and sellers with their global counterparts.
How is Wydr different?
The specialty lies in the fact that we are the only and first ever mobile first innovative wholesale B2B marketplace.
It is worthwhile to note that, presently, we have no direct competition in India and existing players that are out there are neither addressing wholesales pain points nor building on new set of opportunities.
Innovation and technology being deeply embedded in our DNA, our key differentiators lie in the combination of product features and services that we have created specifically for B2B buying and selling. Product features like Negotiation Tools, Multiple Selling Formats, Smart Network capability, Structured Chat enabled features, Private Marketplace capability, amongst others are designed for the needs of this segment.
Our platform services enable speed of business, trust and transparency in terms of operations and transactions. The added smart chat features and favourites options allows buyers on our platform to search, find, mark and refer later to, chats, products, deals, sellers etc. easily at their own time and convenience.
At Wydr, buyers on our platform will get increased sourcing options, real time new product and price discovery, thereby rendering the wholesale hubs redundant.
Also, in terms of our target audience, the sellers on our mobile platform are mid and small size brands, importers and wholesale distributors whereas the buyers are retailers.
Key services from Wydr
We designed this platform in order to make wholesale buying and selling more structured, organized and a hassle free process, with loads of innovative state-of-the-art features packed within.
For example our unique MyNet feature on our mobile app has been conceptualized from the relationship based selling that happens in offline world. With the help of this feature Wholesalers, importers and brands can build their own buyer networks, conduct chats, negotiate and finalize deals with buyers.
HighFive is our proprietary negotiation tool that allows buyers and sellers to negotiate between themselves and lock a new price. So just like in B2B world, a seller can publish a particular price yet sell at different prices to different buyers depending on quantity and repeat business.
Our SmartLeads platform enables buyers to request for quotes from multiple sellers, even for items that are not readily available on the platform.
Similarly there is a host of unique tools and features that are designed for B2B Wholesale.
Funding news
We have done two seed rounds with some leading angel investors and are in the process of raising Series A.
Wydr first received an undisclosed amount of funding in a round of seed funding announced in October, 2015, from Sandeep Aggarwal, co-founder of online marketplace ShopClues and Droom. Devesh was a part of the founding team at ShopClues as well. Wydr is hoping to raise a further 2 million dollars in the next round of funding (i.e. Series A).
Talk to us about market opportunity in the segment of wholesale shopping
According to a report by retail behemoth, Walmart, B2B e-commerce opportunity is currently valued at $300 billion and it is estimated that the market will expand to $700 billion by 2020. Some estimates that out of this at least 5% will move online in 4-5 years. So this segment could be anywhere upwards of $35 BN in five years’ time.
We feel that the factors contributing to this growth will be these:
• The B2B space is largely unstructured in India with the presence of archaic and unorganized distributors and wholesalers. Information available is asymmetrical and not aggregated at one place. Spread over in a fragmented manner.
• The growth of internet has opened huge opportunities for B2B entrepreneurs and the vendors associated with them. Increasing Internet penetration and the availability of more payment options have opened the global market for Indian entrepreneurs, especially the SMEs who had been focusing only on domestic trade.
• Unlike B2C, B2B has no FDI restrictions. Thus, Indian players too have the opportunity of getting foreign investment and grow their business exponentially.
• GST will also play a huge role in providing impetus to the B2B ecommerce sector. ‘Make in India’ campaign will also provide a great push. The space is still at a very nascent stage in India and is just waiting to be tapped, so it can unleash its full potential. Ecommerce marketplaces could well end up leading the pack in B2B commerce.
Innovations are happening in this segment such as ERP integration (buyer and supplier), single window buying and service and solution alignment as per the business needs. We feel that India is going to be the most important market globally.
And how is Wydr doing so far in the wholesale shopping business
Recently launched on March 7th, 2016, we are a young, vibrant, early stage company with a lot of promise and early traction to prove the very promise. We already have more than more a 1000 sellers, 150K catalog and 25000 retailers onboard.
This is what we are aiming for and are committed to achieving:
• Achieve $ 1 Billion in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) in 5-6 years
• Onboard 200,000 to 300,000 Brands, Wholesalers and Importers over a period of 3 to 4 years
• Eventually connect Indian Wholesale buyers and sellers globally
We aim to become a platform of choice for wholesale buyers and sellers by bringing in the best online and mobile innovations that makes wholesale buying and selling easier, more efficient and transparent. For buyers and retailers who are also sometimes sellers, Wydr promises increased sourcing options, real time new product and price discovery, rendering wholesale hubs redundant.
How do you monetize?
Wydr has both a transactional and non-transaction revenue model. For every transaction we charge a selling fee. Apart from that we have many options for sellers to promote themselves on the platform for which we charge a fee.
Any challenges faced while setting up Wydr?
Our biggest challenge was setting up a logistics network which is tech-enabled, has the highest quality of customer experience and yet be cost effective for a business buyers. But our out of the box thinking and deep supply chain logistics experience helped us overcome that challenge.
Another challenge is the complex tax structure that makes cross-state B2B business and invoicing, more or rather unnecessarily complicated.
What advice would you give to new entrants in this space?
Here are certain aspects that newbie entrepreneurs should keep in mind:
Give them what they want – Listen to your buyers. They will look for you on the internet before they reach out to you directly. Therefore, we must give them all the relevant information at one place and make the user experience streamlined with astute design, aesthetics and technology prowess. Consider how your e-commerce solution accounts for the checkout process, approval rules and product search on a mobile device and replicate the same type of convenience here.
We should strive to understand our audience better and personalize their shopping experience accordingly. Aspects like multi-brand, multi-site, user-based permissions, pricing schedules by user, group or company, and streamlined processes characterize some of the personalization needs of B2B companies.
