Taking e-tail to home-based entrepreneurs

As more and more people opting to buy products online, online companies are focusing on tapping smallers businesses — especially home-based individual run concerns — in the country.

According to PwC, the the Indian e-commerce industry has clocked a business of $22 billion in 2015 and is expected to grow phenomenally going forward.

Shopmatic CEO Anurag Avula sees huge business opportunity in hand-holding small businesses to take them into digital space.

“There are many individuals, who want to get online but the level of technical competency is not very high and hence lose out on the opportunity. This is what triggered the idea of creating a webstore for such businesses wherein the whole ecosystem like getting the domain name, integrating logistics, campaign management and also listing on marketplace is done,” Mr Avula said.

Founded in Singapore last year, the company has launched its product in India a month ago. Craftsvilla is another website which promotes small businesses to have their own store through sub-domains. All products will then be segregated and shown under different categories.

Other companies offering similar services are Martjack, Buildabazaar, Zepo and Shopify India, the Indian arm of US firm.

“There are a lot of barriers in terms of high costs and the complicated technology which stops small businesses from adopting them. That is where we would like to help these entrepreneurs,” Mr Avula said.

Social networking major Facebook has also started a new feature which allows small businesses to add their store to their Facebook page, which would allow visitors to the Facebook page to buy products.