The seller meet was organized in Hyderabad on 3rd September, 2016, which was another grand success for Unicommerce after its Pune event, earlier this year.

The main objective of the event was to discuss issues faced by sellers in online selling, and how Unicommerce is helping to solve those issues, especially through launch of some new features like Payment Reconciliation and collaboration with quality listing partners.

The Seller Meet took place at The Golkonda Hotel in Hyderabad, where a good mix of sellers including those starting just now and sellers already selling on multiple marketplaces took part. It was a 3 hour interactive session, where the audience discussed in depth about the challenges they are facing and were very happy with the solutions they got from the Unicommerce team conducting the event.

The event also featured some of the existing customers of Unicommerce who spoke very highly about the product and support provided by the entire Unicommerce team.

The session came to an end with high tea arrangements for the sellers, which served as a good networking opportunity for sellers.

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Ever since Amazon entered the country in June last year, ecommerce in India has shifted dramatically towards the online marketplace model. Because India did not allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in online retail, the global giant restricted itself to being a sales channel for Indian retailers, without stocking and selling its own merchandise.

Amazon made a virtue out of that necessity, causing the marketplace model to catch on in a big way. Indian ecommerce biggies like Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Jabong have joined the race to sign on retailers across India to their platforms.

Sellers are now spoilt for choice: 60 online marketplaces in India vie for their attention, ranging from specialized ones, like the recently-launched engineering goods portal Tolexo to the large diversified ones, like Flipkart. This presents great opportunities for small retailers to hawk their wares across multiple channels. But it has also made things much more complicated for them.

Sellers now struggle to keep track of invoicing, inventories, deliveries, payments, catalogs and so on for one channel – now, imagine doing that for five or more places where your merchandise is listed.

Technology is the obvious answer to deal with this complex web of ecommerce. But a retailer lacks the resources, time and focus to develop sophisticated software in-house and upgrade it constantly.

Jazzmyride, a portal for auto accessories, faced this problem two years after they started up. They wanted to scale up without sullying their user experience. That’s when they turned to a SaaS (software as a service) product called Uniware.

Less is more

The software gives retailers a single panel to track orders on multiple channels. Inventories are synced across all of them. SKUs (stock keeping units) are allocated automatically to each channel depending on how fast a product is moving there, to avoid both idle inventories and stock-outs. It also integrates with more than 25 shipping services for timely deliveries.

Jazzmyride is among 1,000 merchants who have signed up so far with the Delhi-based Unicommerce, which came up with the SaaS solution for them late last year. One of the four partners in the firm, Manish Gupta, who was in Bangalore a few days back to open a southern hub of Unicommerce, told Tech in Asia that most of the retailers on their platform come from Delhi. With the number of online retailers across India expected to exceed  100,000 within two years, Unicommerce is spreading its net: its target is 15 percent of the Indian market, before going global.

Manish Gupta believes their product, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Singapore, will help small retailers in all multi-channel markets. In the US and Europe, ChannelAdvisor and BrightPearl provide similar services. But Unicommerce’s experience in an emerging market like India with its diversity and large population may give them some unique insights.

Fixing payments

Right now, the focus is on adding new features to the product. Payment reconciliation will be an important pain-reliever, because following up on delayed or missed payments is time-consuming. This feature is currently undergoing beta testing.

Automatically updating catalogs across multiple channels, each one with its own idiosyncratic on-boarding process, would remove another headache for sellers.Gupta summed up: “We are in this space to smoothen the relationship between marketplaces and vendors.”

Already, Unicommerce processes over a million orders a month, which represents 10-12 percent of ecommerce in India, excluding travel. It has integrated more than 45 marketplaces on its panel, and vendors can simply choose as many of them as they want to be on.

Large-scale SaaS success stories from India are rare, but Unicommerce does have competition. Goa-based Browntape, which recently secured seed funding, also offers a multi-channel order fulfillment and inventory syncing solution.

Unicommerce too received funding last year from Nexus Venture Partners for its expansion, and hopes to maintain its lead. The company was founded in 2012 by three batchmates from IIT Delhi, who shared the same wing of their hostel. Ankit Pruthi, Karun Singla, and Vibhu Garg went their separate ways after college, before coming together again to start up Unicommerce.

They wanted to apply their technical expertise to solving problems in a buzzing domain, and ecommerce was taking off in India. They found a mentor, Ankush Mehra, with 20 years’ experience in retail, to help them come to grips with the nitty-gritty of order and inventory management.

Uniware changes its shape

When they came up with Uniware in 2012, it was a warehouse management system. Their customers were large ecommerce companies like Snapdeal and Groupon. Last year, when the marketplace model got going, they shifted their focus to solving the problems of small retailers in a multi-channel market, and Uniware took on a new avatar.

The marketplace model gave many sellers the chance to opt for drop-shipping: their margins improved when, instead of holding inventory, they took large orders on the site and arranged for shipments to customers directly from a wholesaler or marketplace.

Unicommerce co-founder Ankit Pruthi explained to Tech in Asia:

“When we observed the percentage of drop-shipments increasing in the industry, we went to visit several drop-ship sellers. That experience was really enlightening and we learnt a lot of their pain points and how they could be solved through technology. We did exactly that and came up with a technology product for sellers.”

It was around then that Pruthi roped in Manish Gupta as a fourth partner. Gupta had cut his teeth on launching and growing IndiaMart, a business-to-business (B2B) marketplace connecting buyers and sellers from the early days of the commercial internet in India. Unicommerce needed his expertise when it adapted to online marketplaces last year.

Overcoming technophobia

It took some persuading for marketplaces to work with Unicommerce. Gupta said:

“Every marketplace likes to keep their vendor information close to the chest. So that made it difficult at the outset. But eventually it was driven by the market. Just yesterday a marketplace approached us, saying they wanted to collaborate with us because so many of their vendors were using the Unicommerce panel.”

The bigger challenge, according to Pruthi, is getting small businesses to overcome their technophobia in adopting SaaS. “We’re resolving this by training them to use the product,” he said.

Going forward, Gupta sees consolidation happening in the Indian ecommerce space on the lines of Flipkart’s acquisition of Myntra recently. But even if there are only three or four large marketplaces left standing in the end, small retailers will need even smarter automated systems to keep up with newer models of ecommerce in a fast-changing landscape. And these sellers would increasingly turn to SaaS providers like Unicommerce to help them keep up with technology.

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At the risk of over simplification, a cloud is “something” that can be accessed and used when you are connected to the Internet. This “something” could be replaced with a service, product, technology, solution or application.

So when it comes to a cloud product, it is basically the product that you can use when you have access to the Internet. Gmail is a classic cloud application. Just like Gmail, you can access any of your cloud based services from multiple devices. All of them are hosted with their providers.

With the advent of cloud computing, industries have been rapidly transitioning from traditional centralised management models to the cloud based mobile solutions. Cloud technology is especially aligned with some very common Indian traits.

Checkout the following 7 ways in which Cloud works great for Indians…

1. Indians and Freebies – A connect stronger than many may follow

David Ogilvy has identified “FREE” to be one of the most powerful marketing words. He may have surely included Indians in his study. Give it for FREE and it becomes difficult to spare. This actually kicks of your journey with a cloud technology. Most cloud services offer a freemium model. There are basically 2 styles here. You get access to the complete service for a limited time. If you are satisfied and want to continue with it, you’ll have to start paying. The second style is the one wherein you get limited access to a service. If you are happy and want to use the complete functionality, then you have to upgrade to the premium model.

Cloud technologies can use such revenue models as there are no hardware and manual setups involved. Delivering cloud services is rather easy and cheap. Companies don’t have to spend much per customer. So the overall pricings too are well within anyone’s budget.

This model suits for Indians for 2 reasons –

1. Love for freebies

2. Overall reasonable and economic pricing

2. We want to know how much it all costs; but we don’t want it all – at least not immediately –

Cloud solutions don’t cost a fortune. They are flexible. You can start with a plan that meets your immediate needs. A certain plan allows a fixed number of users, transactions, orders or some other similar parameter. If your business grows beyond these, then only you’ll have to move to the higher costing packages. This covers any risk of overspending.

Your cloud services will cost more only if you expand. And expansions indicate you are doing  good in business. So there’s nothing to complain about. Such services make you more productive on all fronts. You won’t mind paying more.

3. Enough is Never Enough-

This is another Indian trait that is very difficult to miss. No matter how many people claim that a certain service is complete value for money – Indians somehow manage to see what else is possible.

This one characteristic makes a cloud solution an absolute delight for Indians. Cloud services keep on improving. New features and greater functionality are continuously added to them. New versions are released often.

Your investment is repaid thoroughly through these consistent upgrades. You get free access to all the upgrades for as long as you are a member.

4. Cloud is as Good as a Shared Auto

Indians understand and value the concept of sharing. They do so very well as it significantly brings down the individual costs – just like a shared auto.

Cloud solutions, too, are based on the idea of sharing. Just like any other businesses, development of features and functionality for a cloud service too requires capital. But individuals don’t face the impact of such costs as they are shared by the complete network.

5. Indians find Maintenance Extremely Taxing

Nothing to be proud of, but we are really bad at maintenance. Be it maintaining our country or the public infrastructure, we aren’t star performers.

Following this tendency, our business solutions too shouldn’t demand a lot of attention. Cloud products don’t need maintenance. The cloud product makers take care of everything – right from delivering the services to forcing the updates. All the maintenance falls in the share of the makers.

A special shout out for this feature – You DON’T need any reminder for  any updates. They are AUTOMATIC.

6. Zero tolerance for Corrupt Copies

Honestly, we can’t even afford 1% of the population to get corrupt; because that too would be a massive number. Indians are naturally sceptical about getting cheated. This tendency reflects in their cyber space too. They pay special attention to the credibility of any software that they use for business. It could be mentioned as just another reason why cloud solutions can be really popular with Indians.

All cloud services are hosted at their providers’ centres. They are never installed in a system. They can only be accessed through a system with the help of internet.

Virus infected or corrupt copies can never create problems with cloud services. They are not susceptible to such attacks.

7. Cloud Systems Inherit the Classic Indian Joint Family Structure

You’ll rarely come across stand alone cloud products. Typically a couple of products are bundled together and then sold as a package. This is sensible as companies take resort in cloud solutions for managing complex departments like sales, accounts or HR. It is not possible for a single product to deliver functionality to take care of each of these.

If you run a business, you will need many cloud products. So it’s important that you ensure each product is compatible and can be integrated smoothly with the rest of the machinery.

Unless all the products work in cohesion, your overall productivity may be compromised. The next time when you subscribe to a cloud product, do spend some time understanding its integration capabilities.

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