Social media has not restricted to networking with friends and peers but has emerged as a tool to network with targeted clients. Social media is being leveraged by small sellers to boost their business. There are more than two billion social media users worldwide, representing a global rate of around 28 per cent of total digital users. From Facebook to selling via Instagram or WhatsApp group, social media channels are providing a platform for small businesses to boost their reach even in tier 3 and tier 4 cities.
Seller available on social channels requires platforms to facilitate their business. With an objective to boost the SME segment on social media channels, many Indian platforms are offering tools for trading, shipments and managing accounts etc. to these small sellers. If you are a small business looking at reaching out to a larger customer base through social media, here are a few companies that can help you do exactly that.
Mall91:
Mall91 is India's first vernacular social commerce platform built specifically for the next 400M users coming online. Through an innovative technology platform which combines live videos based shopping, local language voice recognition based catalogue discovery and Whatsapp like chat/messaging based checkouts, Mall91 has reached to 2000+ Tier 2/3/4 towns/villages of India and creating a new massive market by enabling Bharat users to perform their life's 1st eCommerce transaction. Its unique approach of offering additional high engagement, high-frequency use cases around social gaming, entertainment, content, payments is resulting in becoming a daily first screen app for the next 400M users.
Shiprocket for shipments:
Shiprocket is a logistic tech aggregation platform that automates logistics solutions for small businesses in the ecommerce sector. With the help of deep technology such as data analytics and AI, this startup helps recommend the best shipping medium and partner to sellers. The platform integrates with several leading and specialised logistics partners such as Delhivery, Xpressbees, FedEx, Blue Dart, etc to provide seamless logistic services. It has one of the largest networks in India with 26,000 pin codes available for pickups, deliveries, and CoD. Shiprocket’s CORE (courier recommendation engine) is the first-of-its-kind and optimises courier selection on more than 10 variables, including shipment weight, pickup and delivery performance, RTO performance, mode and cost, and is able to automatically select the most appropriate courier partner and mode for each seller’s shipment that’s processed on the platform.
Lendingkart for payments:
Lendingkart Technologies Private Limited is a fintech startup in the working capital space. The company aims to transform small business lending by making it convenient for SMEs to access credit easily. The company uses technology and analytics tools, analysing thousands of data points from various data sources to assess the creditworthiness of small businesses rapidly and accurately. Lendingkart has developed technology tools based on big data analysis, which facilitates lenders in evaluating borrower’s creditworthiness and providing other related services.
Khata Book for account management
Khata Book is a ledger account book to replace your traditional bahi khata by a new digital ledger cash book. The tool is free, and the company claims it is secure for all types of businesses to maintain their customers' accounts. A traditional bahi khata (ledger book) requires users to spend hours tallying and recording transactions physically. Khata Book, on the other hand, automatically takes care of all accounting needs. With features like payment reminders, where an automatic SMS is sent to your customer’s every time a transaction is recorded against them, Khata Book has helped users bring transparency to their business.
Meesho to start your business
Meesho is an Indian-origin social commerce platform founded by IIT Delhi graduates, which enables small businesses and individuals to start their online stores via social media channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Meesho is headquartered in Bengaluru, India and is one of the three Indian companies to be selected for Y Combinator in 2016. It was also a part of the first batch of Google Launchpad - Solve for India programme.
