Snapdeal Pilots Home Services Category In Four Cities

Alibaba and SoftBank backed Snapdeal is looking to expand its home-services category across four cities – Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai and Pune, reported ET.

The current model which has a handful of vendors lists services across carpentry, plumbing, pest control and installation services; Easyfix, Hicare, Terminix SIS and Jack On Block are the four service providers listed on Snapdeal’s website.

“We are currently running a pilot across four cities for the last 40 days. Home-services is an interesting space and we will decide on the business model which works best for us,” said Rahul Taneja, VP of category management at Snapdeal.

The on-demand services space is growing since last year and has seen investments as big as $25 Mn (INR 165 Cr.) which was raised by services aggregator UrbanClap led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Meanwhile, Amazon also set the ball rolling by investing about $22.5 Mn (INR 150 Cr.) in on-demand services aggregator Housejoy last year.

Online classifieds company, Quikr, is also planning to invest about $37.5 Mn (INR 250 Cr.) in its home services category to take on its rivals. The company had launched its home services vertical in October last year by the name QuikrServices.

Other than these players, online classifieds companies Sulekha and JustDial have also re-invented themselves to provide better discovery of businesses listed with them.

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