BWDisrupt interacted with Anrag Avula, Founder Shopmatic.Please share the startup journey from inception till now?Shopmatic was incorporated in December 2014 by Anurag Avula (Chief Executive Officer & Founder) along with Yen Ti Lim (Chief Operating Officer & Founder), and Kris Chen (Chief Product Officer & Founder) with their combined experience of over 50 years in the payments & ecommerce industry. The vision was to empower small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to take their business online in the simplest, easiest and transparent way. The Shopmatic idea was born when they met many small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs who wanted to expand or start their business by selling online but didn’t know how to go about it. The idea being that technology know-how and costs shouldn’t prevent sellers from fulfilling their aspirations while giving them a level playing field with the entire ecosystem to sell.
Describe your Startup's Business Model. Shopmatic empowers and enables small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to sell online. We do this by providing the entire ecosystem to sell online – from creating a unique webstore with payment acceptance and shipping services integrated into the platform and the ability to list on marketplaces and social channels and insights to sell more. Sellers can use the platform to upload unlimited products at a monthly subscription fee of $20. Shopmatic is built around three core principles that keep the customer at the centre of the company :
Customer Value Proposition – a rigorous and perpetual product build that seeks to provide the width & depth in our proposition to make the lives of our customer better.
Integrated Intelligence – leveraging the richness of our data to provide value to our closed loop ecosystem of sellers to sell more, buyers to have a great user experience & partners to grow their business.
Engagement – the understanding that each customer is different and requires us to adapt to their needs in a manner that supports their unique aspirations is the thought behind the customer engagement team that handholds each customer through their lifecycle.
Unique key feature/services, How is it diff. from existing ones?Shopmatic is different from other players in the following areas:
The entire ecosystem for selling online
Our target audience of individual entrepreneurs and the creation of the category. The ability to list on marketplaces & social channels
The easiest to build your online presence
Transparent & disruptive pricing.
Localised & customised for different markets
What is currently your Funding Status?Shopmatic is privately funded at the initial seed stage.
What Future plans do you have in mind?
Shopmatic is currently available in India from January 2016 and in Singapore & Hong Kong from Q2, 2016. Shopmatic intends to be present in Indonesia, Philippines & Thailand in the next few months.
Can you tell us about your Market size & opportunity? Shopmatic is changing the lives of small businesses & individual entrepreneurs in India, Singapore & Hong Kong. There are over 51 million small and medium businesses in India and a significant base of untapped individual entrepreneurs. With an online retail to retail sales at a very low single digit percentage in the markets that we aim to be, the opportunity to capitalise on the growth to come is significant. In the next couple of years we expect the market opportunity of sellers to be over 20 million sellers in the markets we plan to be.
Discuss with us the Monetization model you have been implementing?Shopmatic’s pricing is transparent and subscription based at $20 for India, $30 for Singapore and $38 for Hong Kong.
What is your current Traction Details?
Shopmatic has over 15000 customers with over 8000 users. There are also significant partnerships with CAIT to take the 60 million traders online.
What are the Marketing Plans & Challenges Faced?Shopmatic’s marketing efforts are driven around awareness creation about the simplicity and width of our Product Offering - an extremely superior product at a very disruptive price.
This is to remove the inertia that potential online sellers have about going online.
Our efforts are focused on debunking perceptions of the online world through our product offering that makes it easy for anyone to sell online
helping individuals realise their potential by taking their hobbies, talents, interests as an online business.
Given that Shopmatic is present in different countries with varying technology comfort levels, the brand also needs to have relevant conversations with potential customers in India, Singapore and Hong Kong.
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Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
