Exclusive: How demonetization has affected Shopclues

Shopclues is an e-commerce company for the masses and most of their orders come from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. The company released a bundle of services aimed at offline merchants this week and that got us thinking, how has the company been affected due to Modi’s surprise move.

Sanjay Sethi, CEO, Shopclues talked to Business Insider to give an insight on whether India is truly moving towards a cashless shopping destination; online and offline.

Online vs. Offline

“Digitizing the merchants have always been the plan. We want to digitize lakhs of merchants so that they affect crores of customers’’ says Sethi.

He calls Shopclues- the platform for merchants first, then customers.

Sethi emphasized that the difference between online and offline is decreasing rapidly. ”Now, it doesn’t make sense for retailers to not come online because they will be losing out. If you are an online seller and you don’t want to go offline and open a store, it is understandable but offline sellers need to go online because the convenience is unmatched.’’

Sanjay maintained that the company’s revenue will grow because of its sellers,”10% of our revenue is coming from seller services and in the next 24 months, we expect that to grow to 30%.’’

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Demonetization Shopclue-less?

Demonetization affected Shopclues in terms of platform traffic. “There was a significant drop in traffic in the first three-four days as 30% of our orders were Cash on Delivery.’’

Not just that, even after the move the company’s traffic is lowered at 5% compared to last year.

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“It’s much more convenient for us to go cashless even though things are yet to settle. We are experiencing the same number of orders but the ticket-size and the no. Of units have decreased.’’

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Sethi believes that another game changer in the e-commerce sector will be when GST is rolled out, but that’s another strike, waiting to happen.