“To fund growth plans, we are looking at raising an additional USD 25 million from existing and new investors now and we should be closing the round soon,” said co-founder Mr Jasmeet Thind
Coutloot, the social commerce, offline to online (O2O) platform that allows buyers to bargain the final price, is raising around $25-million from existing and new investors “To fund growth plans, we are looking at raising an additional USD 25 million from existing and new investors now and we should be closing the round soon,” said co-founder Mr Jasmeet Thind.
The Mumbai-based e-comm startup primarily lists non-MRP (non-fixed-price), unbranded local marketplace (apparel, electronics, home decor, groceries) sellers, the kind responsible for 75 percent of India’s offline commerce. Coutloot’s differentiating feature of allowing bargaining, that too in one’s vernacular language, is a first in the industry. A customer can chat in their preferred language which then gets translated into the seller’s preferred language on the Coutloot’s app chat platform.
Given its primary consumer target of bargain hunters, Coutloot’s best-performing sellers are from small towns like Nagaon in Assam, Basai near Gurugram, Korba in Chhattisgarh, Surat in Gujarat, and Ludhiana in Punjab. Unlike other social media apps which onboard sellers to resell merchandise, Coutloot has sellers that own 100 percent of the products showcased.
Coutloot services the transactions with supply-chain support, AI-based automatic cataloguing, payments tech, and by also driving buyers to the sellers store. “Coutloot’s business model attempts to fix the broken sales and supply chain in unbranded retail and sales in the non-MRP segment,” said Thind.
The scale of Coutloot’s operations:-
– Coutloot reaches 500,000 offline retailers, mom-and-pop stores, home sellers, and street hawkers, of whom >70 percent are from India’s small towns.
– There are more than 20 million listings on Coutloot’s app.
– Coutloot boasts of a seller retention rate of 42 percent (quarterly), leaving its peers in social commerce and O2O behind.
– Coutloot has been downloaded over 7.2 million times, and is ranked among the Top-30 apps on app stores.
– Unlike only-SAAS O2O platforms, SAAS+marketplace-modelled Coutloot’s seller-success rate (percentage of sellers who have got orders) is as high as 62 percent, because of its focus on ensuring most of its sellers make that elusive first sale.
Coutloot Co-founder Mahima Kaul said, “This is just the beginning of local commerce going online. E-commerce is still in its early days in India, and two-thirds of it is dominated by marketplaces. But the reality is that e-commerce penetration is only around 10 percent. Coutloot creates trust between sellers and buyers while empowering them to take offline transactions online.” Coutloot’s unbranded seller-centric model promises to act as the #vocalforlocal alternative to predatory practices of e-commerce giants that deal primarily with large sellers, resellers and established brands.
Launched in 2016, Coutloot has already raised $8-million from domestic investors such as Artha India Ventures, Venture Catalysts, Astarc Ventures and Nine Unicorns, and the US-based SOSV Fund, among others
Source: Business World
