Shopo is an online marketplace for handcrafted designer products. Based out of Chennai with a core team of 2, Shopo is bringing handpicked designers to sell their stuff online. The product ranges from bags to jewelry to wall arts to bed covers, pretty much everything that can be hand-crafted. 
1. How is the order fulfillment done?
Shopo has tied up with fedex for the logistics. The order fulfillment is a Shopo + Seller effort. This is what happens when an order comes through.
A confirmation mail is sent to the seller and it is followed up with an SMS. The seller confirms the order by clicking through the mail. A pick up is scheduled within 24 hours, i.e Fedex goes and picks up the stuff from the seller’s place and drops it at the buyers place.
We are proud to be the only marketplace model that also takes care of the logistics bit! So far, all our orders have reached the buyer within 3-5 days and the response has been pretty good :).
2. How big is the seller network?
If you are talking about the reach of sellers, the current set of 20 sellers, together have a social reach of about 30,000 individuals!
If you are talking about the no. of sellers, We have handpicked 20 out of a preliminary list of 600 and launched with them! We intend to keep screening and launching a set of sellers in regular intervals. In fact, we will be launching 5 new sellers by end of this month!
One small but unique thing about Shopo is that they are giving a face to the seller (bio and profile pic). Given the kind of products they are selling, this gives a personal feel and a factor of trust to the buyers. On the UI front although efforts can been seen, yet there seems to be lot of scope, specially when to comes to call-to-action colors. On the SEO front, there is quite some work needed. Nonetheless, I liked their concentration on products.
The current handicraft market is quite fragmented with little to no discoverability. The purchase is usually impulsive and there is no ‘standard price’. You never know if the thing you are buying for 100 is available for 10 somewhere else. A major portion of the money is made by the middle men who bring the stuff to the market and not by the creators. Such startups are certainly filling a need gap.
Although there are people already selling stuff on Ebay etc. but there is no brand building in this space yet. There is no go-to place when it comes to handicrafts. There is a big opportunity here.
What do you think of Shopo? Would you buy designer stuff online?
Similar Startups – NCR based NetHaat and Bangalore Based Aporv
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
