Stellaris Venture Partners Led $5 Mn Funding In Social Ecommerce Startup Shop101

Social ecommerce platform Shop101 has raised $5 Mn in funding in a round led by Stellaris Venture Partners. Vy Capital, TaxiForSure co-founder Raghunandan G, and Livspace co-founder Ramakant Sharma also participated in Shop 101’s funding round.

Shop101 was founded by Abhinav Jain and Aditya Gupta in 2015 and was officially launched in early 2016. It enables entrepreneurs to sell online as well as on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram with zero investment by providing an online store in less than two minutes.

Established merchants, as well as budding entrepreneurs including housewives, college students and young graduates, can put up their own products or resell from an extensive range of products available on the Shop101 Supply platform.

Rahul Chowdhri, Partner, Stellaris Venture Partners said, “Social commerce provides a more human touch to an online selling experience and opens up a new set of opportunities by tapping into the next 500 million users by providing a layer of trust, and curation. With a deep focus on technology, Shop101 enables entrepreneurs to sell on social platforms and to procure supply directly from manufacturers and brands,.”

As a part of the transaction, Rahul will join the company’s board.

The Shop101 mobile app also enables lakhs of sellers across India to sell online seamlessly within minutes by providing end to end order processing, inventory management, pan-India logistics (including cash on delivery), payment support, and a wide-range of supply.

The startup will use the newly-infused capital to strengthen its core leadership and product team, scale the supplier network and enhance the technology platform.

Abhinav Jain, Founder & CEO, Shop101 said, “We have grown 25-30% month on month over the last couple of years and empowered more than 3 lakh entrepreneurs across the country with reliable and scalable technology, extensive range of products on supply platform, pan-India logistics and payment solutions. With an extreme focus on technology and supported by an exceptional team, we have been able to build a very high-quality platform that can help entrepreneurs earn much more as well as save money by operating at really low costs.”

Social ecommerce is a niche which is growing at a fast pace since the last few years. The reason? Have a look at some numbers projected by a 2017 Zinnov Report.

• India’s ecommerce market is aiming to touch $220 Bn by 2025, benefitting from this – the online housewive resellers are going to touch 21-23 Mn by 2022.
• The Zinnov report also stated that online resellers space has been projected to grow to $48 Bn-$60 Bn by 2022.
• The market share of online resellers is expected to rise from the current 1.2% of the Indian retail market to 5.4%.

If that is not enough, with an Internet user base of 462 Mn, India has the second largest online user population in the world, second only to China.

Further, Google and Boston Consulting Group, India has about 50 Mn registered small businesses and at present, about one million of them are online, mostly selling through Facebook and WhatsApp. It is expected that 10 Mn of these businesses will be online by 2020.

The burgeoning opportunities in this space have given rise to a startup brigade in India. Apart from Shop101, other notable names in the industry are Meesho, Zepo, and Shopmatic among others