Mumbai-based e-commerce platform, Shop101 has raised ₹34 crores ($5 million) in series A funding led by Stellaris Venture Partners. Other existing investors Vy Capital, Raghunandan G, co-founder of TaxiForSure, and Ramakant Sharma, co-founder of Livspace also participated in the round.
The funds raised will be used to strengthen the core leadership and product team, scale the supplier network and enhancing of the technology platform.
Shop101 is an online selling app that helps its users to sell their products online. This is done by helping the users set up an online store for free within two minutes and users can also sell using the social media platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram. It was founded by Abhinav Jain and Aditya Gupta in 2015.
It provides an opportunity for established merchants and budding entrepreneurs alike to sell their own products or resell products from the vast product line available on Shop101 supply platform. It provides complete marketplace solutions like inventory management and logistics to its users. It also provides more than 50 different payment modes including cash on delivery option to make their transactions seamless.
The company has claimed to have over 1 lakh registered sellers having disbursed more than 5 lakh orders, worth over 100 crores.
Abhinav Jain, co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer, Shop101, said, “Our vision is to democratize e-commerce by empowering entrepreneurs and small merchants to launch their own online store as well as sell on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and other social channels with a few clicks. We have grown 25-30% month on month over the last couple of years”.
India’s e-commerce market is expected to be worth around ₹15,12,000 crores ($220 billion) by 2025. The market share of online resellers is expected to grow from 1.2% to 5.4% in the Indian retail market. With 462 million users online, India is a gold mine for the e-commerce market.
In the same space as Shop101, there are many other players that are starting to make their impact like Meesho, Zepo, and Shopmatic, among many others.