The company said its focus on smaller cities is largely due to the opportunity size and the reality of the challenges that small city sellers face versus big cities.
“E-commerce adoption, small minimum order quantity purchases, access to credit are some of the early trends that are common across retailers. Coutloot’s strategy for the next year is to consolidate and increase our penetration of supply, demand and services offered to a particular retailer while capturing a mass share in the non grocery retail market,” Jasmeet Thind, Cofounder of CoutLoot said.
India has seen digital distribution precede physical distribution across multiple industries and sectors and that creates an inherent value proposition for Indian startups that are solving for real customer pain-points and are disrupting the middle men. The company has recently entered offline retailing where it transforms and standardizes existing small retail shops selling unbranded merchandise which are already part of CoutLoot’s platform The existing small retailers currently generate between Rs70,000 to 5 lakh per month in sales.
“Their current average sales would be around Rs 12 lakh per year and there would be around 25% uplift in sales,” added Thind.
In India, branded retail segment is still 10-15% of the overall market, while the rest is highly unorganised, a space which Coutloot wants to tap into. At present, retailers face two key challenges – generating demand and managing supply chains. Also, smaller stores still source 90% of their requirements from the open market which includes intermediaries
Founded by Thind and Mahima Kaul, CoutLoot has more than 16 million users and over 32 lakh sellers and stores in its network with an annual gross merchandise value of $100 million. The company has so far received funding of $17 million from investors including Ameba Capital, 9Unicorns, NB Ventures and Artha India Ventures among others.
