The Economic Times daily newspaper is available online now.

    Meesho’s CEO says a one-stop app won’t fit the needs of a vastly diverse country like India

    Vidit Aatrey, Founder & CEO

    Story outline

    • Meesho was founded in 2015 and has a network of around 6 lakh Indian sellers.
    • Meesho does not charge any commission from sellers using its platform.
    • The company earns its revenue through ads and a push ranking system.
    Vidit Aatrey (in pic) explained that Meesho doesn’t create a single standard experience for every customer in the country.
    In the last two years, the small-business community has quickly jumped into the e-commerce bandwagon — be it creating individual platforms for online selling or partnering up with an aggregator. However, switching from offline to online sounds easier than done. For aggregators like Meesho, one of the biggest challenges was around languages and dialects.

    “In India, a lot of people know how to write English, but they often make spelling mistakes. For example, sellers will write oxidised as a-u-x-i-d-i-z-e-d, because that's how they spell it. We struggled with this a lot,” Vidit Aatrey, CEO of Meesho, told ET Digital on the sidelines of the inauguration of T-Hub 2.0 in Hyderabad on June 28.

    India being a very diverse country, every state, every city behaves in a very different way. “Even if the language is the same in a few cities, the dialect changes. Sellers sourcing a product use different words for the same product, and it is different when they write something. So we have over time used a lot of technology, especially machine learning and AI, to really personalise the experience for every user,” he said.
    meesho
    The CEO explained that Meesho doesn’t create a single standard experience for every customer in the country. If you open the app in Hyderabad, the experience you get will be different from the one you get when opening it in, say, Bengaluru, Delhi or Chennai.
    “India is a very heterogeneous country. We have realised that it is very hard to have one app that serves everyone. But we will continue to solve this problem with technology. There is no other way. You can’t do it manually because then you have to keep doing it for more than 10 years,” he said.
    Bengaluru-based Meesho was founded in 2015 and has a network of around 6 lakh Indian sellers. One of the reasons Aatrey said it was able to achieve this vast network was because of the company’s “no-commission” policy. Like it says, Meesho does not charge any commission from sellers using its platform. The company earns its revenue through ads and a push ranking system. It turned a unicorn last year after SoftBank infused $300 million into the company.

    “When we started back in 2015, e-commerce had been there for about seven-eight years. None of those platforms had any SMEs online. We spent some time on this and figured out that one of the biggest problems of business was that e-commerce was charging commissions. Brands have higher margins, they can always pay you commissions, unlike small businesses. Therefore, the first innovation that we did was saying zero commission would be charged. We are the first platform to do that in India,” he said.

    When asked to comment on the issue of cash-on-delivery returns — a major problem in the e-commerce industry that causes a huge loss to the merchants — Aatrey replied that there might be several reasons for that.

    A lot of women in the country who like to shop online do not have access to credit cards, debit cards or even UPI. “They usually get money from their husbands as cash and that is how they buy things. But I believe over time, everyone will get access to digital finance. My mom still uses only cash payments as she believes online transactions cut more money. So, there is that trust deficit as well and that will stay for some time. Until then we have to keep building better infrastructure so we can cover everyone,” he added.
    ( Originally published on Jul 05, 2022 )

    Read More News on

    SIDBI MSME Conclave 2024 |Register Now.
    ...more

    Read More News on

    SIDBI MSME Conclave 2024 |Register Now.
    ...more
    The Economic Times

    Stories you might be interested in