Social commerce company ShopG is scaling up its presence to over 300 cities in the country and onboarding more partners as it looks to tap into the multi-billion dollar opportunity in the segment.
ShopG was founded in 2019 by Ankur Arora, Abhishek Mishra, Pranay Suwalka and Yogesh Nehra, and is backed by investors including Orios Venture Partners and RPSG Ventures. The company currently has 1,000 “community leaders” (local micro-entrepreneurs).
“ShopG plans to acquire a consumer base of 40 million served by 5 lakh community leaders by 2025. The company’s vision is to address the unfulfilled aspirations of customers and thereby, build a GMV of Rs 4,000 crore as ShopG expands to 300-plus cities across India,” ShopG co-founder Ankur Arora said.
The expansion will primarily focus on tier III and IV locations across states of Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
These include Mandya, Shimoga, Tiruppur, Salem, Tirunelveli, Kollam, Parbhani, Junagarh, Akola, Panipat, Hisar and Sagar among others.
The platform has features like vernacular language support, videos and gamified content (provides a chance to earn rewards, coins and gifts) to make the shopping experience enriching for customers.
Currently, three languages (Hindi, English and Kannada) are supported and the company plans to introduce more than 12 languages over the next one year.
ShopG is also looking at leveraging its platform to help its community leaders build brands that cater to local requirements.
The company has already launched a D2C-owned brand ‘Ohayo Natural’ in the skincare segment, and plans to launch 10 other brands by 2025.
Arora said the low-trust quotient among tier III consumers vis–vis online shopping created a compelling need to establish ShopG for capitalising on this untapped opportunity.
Arora said players such as ShopG have a massive growth opportunity in the next five years by tapping prospective consumers in all tier III and IV cities.
He cited a Bain & Co report to say that social commerce is poised to grow from USD 1.5 billion USD 2 billion GMV market currently to USD 16 billion USD 20 billion within five years, and USD 60 billion USD 70 billion by 2030.
GMV (gross merchandise value) is a term used in online retailing to indicate the gross merchandise value of the products sold through the marketplace over a certain period of time.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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