E-commerce with regional focus gaining ground

BENGALURU: Working as an IT professional in Bengaluru was getting tiresome for Meghanath Singh. He had grown up in Manipur, and during his almost two decades in Bengaluru, he had to rely on visiting relatives to provide him with home-cooked food.

That gave him an idea. He quit his job in 2014 and teamed up with two friends, Surchand Wahengbam and Ratheesh Elayat, to start an e-commerce platform that sells exclusive eco-friendly North East products, from Manipur’s black rice to Nagaland’s handmade shawls.

Today, their venture Giskaa has around 1,500 sellers, from all the eight states of the Northeast selling products around the world and Singh says the venture is profitable.

A number of e-commerce portals focused on products from a certain region have emerged — Kashmirbox for Kashmiri products, Jaypore for ethnic Rajasthani products, and Farsankart for Gujarati snacks. And unlike the better-known big etailers, these portals have a significant customer base outside India, and all say they are profitable.

Delhi-based Jaypore, launched in 2012 by Puneet Chawla and Shilpa Sharma, started as a premium brand for Rajasthani jewellery and handicrafts, but has since expanded to include a range of ethnic products from several regions of India. Chawla says Jaypore sees on an average around 8,000 monthly transactions, with an average bill size of Rs 4,800.

The highest selling products are crafts like Madhubani paintings of Bihar and block printing or Kalamkari paintings of Andhra Pradesh. It recently raised Rs 30 crore from venture firm Aavishkaar to expand their reach and market their brand.

While Chawla knew right from day one who Jaypore’s target customers were going to be, for Farsankart, an online platform that sells farsan (fried Gujarati snacks) from vendors in Vadodara, the customers were a surprise.

“Almost 90% of our overseas customers are Gujarati but the majority of the customers in India are non-Gujarati, which is strange. I never knew farsan was popular among people who weren’t Gujaratis,” says founder Darshan Dhruv who started the platform in 2011.

Giskaa’s Singh too realized an interesting fact about his customers. “Our customers were not the typical e-commerce crowd. They were in the age group of 45 to 50 with no obvious affinity towards the North East,” he says.

May be it was helped by the fact that Giskaa includes little motifs and the history behind every particular product that is shipped. “The user gets to read why the product is famous in a particular region of the North East and the artisan who made it,” says Singh.

Most have to work closely with the artisans and vendors to get them online. “We list most of the products ourselves as the artisans have little knowledge of e-commerce,” says Singh.

Kashmirbox’s Muheet Mehraj, having been born and brought up in Srinagar, wanted to change the ecosystem around the Kashmiri artisans who had spent years making products like pashmina shawls, carpets, and ethnic wear. Today, the platform has over 2,000 artisans who are provided logistics and supply chain support.

"The artisans also have a 10% equity in the company," he says. Half of its Indian customer base comes from tier 2-3 cities of India.

A significant chunk of all their revenues comes from international customers. Jaypore ships to over 50 countries and 25% of its revenue comes from countries like UK, Canada, and the US. Farsankart, which broke even in one year, sees 40% of its revenue coming from the US and the UK. Kashmirbox ships to 30 countries, its average ticket size is Rs 3,500 and became profitable last year.

Mehraj says building a company in an ecosystem like Kashmir was hard, made tougher by the fact that the region has poor electricity service.

“But the main challenge for a niche e-commerce site is that most products are not branded. So there is a trust issue,” says Atrai Mukherjee, who faced the problem when she started MySweetStore, an online platform selling Bengali sweets, in 2014. She sold it off within a year to a Bengali sweet shop, after she relocated to Mumbai.

The other challenge is scaling the business, since they are focussed only on one region. Jaypore realized it early. Its three-member cluster development team now travels all across India looking for unique and ethnic products that can be added to Jaypore’s portfolio. Farsankart is planning to go beyond Vadodara. Kashmirbox wants to expand slowly. Mehraj says it may look at Rajasthan next.
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