SnapDeal to Shutdown Shopo- The Indian Itsy

By Shariq Hussain

Posted on February 10, 2017

As the online marketplace Snapdeal is having a hard time for raising their fresh funds, the company has now decided to shut down its in-app, zero-commission affiliate marketplace – Shopo. This will aid Snapdeal in cost cutting and conservation of cash. Shopo aimed to become Itsy of India, Itsy is the market leader in handicrafts market place.  Craftsvilla was also playing in the same battle field but eventually changed their position as ethinic market place.

The platform will stop operation from 10^th January 2017. The company has sent emails to all their sellers revealing the shutdown operations. As the result, many sellers has started merging with other e-commerce platforms.

Shopo was acquired by Snapdeal in May 2013. It is the marketplace for everything with an Indian culture for contemporary and traditional Indian designer and handmade goods. It was founded by S Theyagarajan and was backed by Sequoia Capital and angel investor Sashi Reddi. The operations of Shopo were taken place from Chennai.

Shopo in their blog quoted: “We started, a year-and-a-half ago, from a small conference room with our mission to enable small and individual sellers across India to sell online. In this short time, we have together discovered the dynamism and vibrancy in the C2C space in India. We thank you for your support and feedback that enabled our young team to help more than 2 Lakhs sellers start and grow their online shops. The e-commerce market in India will continue its robust growth. However, we realize that it will take some more years for a broader ecosystem to develop around the C2C segment.”

Sahil Shah, CEO, and founder of Big Foot Retail Pvt. Ltd which runs C2C marketplace, Kraftly said: “We are experiencing unexceptional growth in seller’s sign-in process. We usually add 1000-1500 sellers per week. But now we are adding around 2000-3000 sellers per week. We are a total of 50,000 sellers as of now and target to be at 200,000 by the end of the year.”

Snapdeal has continued closing and merging many of its services. In efforts to low the costs and consume funds, the startup has moved to co-working space in October 2016 instead of operating from a leased building. Snapdeal has also stopped marketplace for premium branded fashion and lifestyle products, Exclusively. Following that the company also stopped the incentive program for customers that it previously launched through affiliates.

End of year Snapdeal significantly lost $495 Million while the revenue was about $217.6 Million which faced almost 50% loss. Till date, over $1.76 Bn has been raised by Snapdeal. Founders Kunal Bhal and Rohit Bhanal are continuously seeking for raise in funds but haven’t found any success. Read starup news.

SnapDeal to Shutdown Shopo- The Indian Itsy