India accounts for 13 million small and medium retailers, it is estimated that an average of 40 customers walk into each retailer every day, which means 520 million customers are shopping every day at these retail stores.
Online retail with over a decade is still less than 5% of the entire retail. There is a huge gap identified between the technology prevailing in the offline stores and the consumers.
While the current trends might paint us a picture that online shopping has taken over the world, but the sad reality is, that Online retail is still less than 5% of the entire retail. Understanding this huge gap between the technology prevailing in the offline stores and the consumers, is a Gurgaon based startup called PoketShop.
Based on the O2O (Online to Offline) model, PoketShop is an open marketplace which acts as a simple, cost-effective marketing and sales platform for local retailers to showcase interesting merchandise to users nearby.
The Poketapp's merchant app allows retail businesses to quickly setup a store on the app and start selling their merchandise, flash sales, limited time deals, products, all this in just under 90 seconds. For consumers, PoketShop is a discovery app for whats new in brick& mortar stores around them. The app features promotions, new arrivals, flash sales, limited offers from high street stores, malls to cafes or eating out places.
In short, PoketShop is a marketplace for physical retail stores, brands and businesses to allow them to provide their users the online experience while being able to increase sales at their location.
According to Samarth Goyal – Co Founder, PoketShop, the main problem with todays shoppers is that they might know what's around them in terms of physical locations, but they aren't aware about what's happening inside those businesses at that moment.
On the same hand, The No. 1 challenge for offline retailers is new customer acquisition, "How do you get people in the neighbourhood to walk into their business with the intent to make a purchase?" This is where PoketShop steps in and makes a difference.
The self funded & bootstrapped startup has a combined forty years of experience in its founding team, Siddharth Bhatia, Abhishek Satapathy and Samarth Goyal. While this is Abhishek's first venture, Siddharth and Samarth are 2nd time entrepreneurs, whose earlier venture was a VC funded services startup.
While they currently have 300 local stores, brands and businesses in Gurgaon in such a short span. They plan to reach 2000 stores by next quarter in Gurgaon itself. With their app retention at an high 50%, the target doesn't seem to be a tough one to achieve.
In its future plans, the startup plans to do product enhancement that is to include beacons technology, increase stores analytics and the use of social shopping element. The Gurgaon headquartered startup aims to reach the targeted number of 2000 stores by end of quarter. The company is building its merchant app both on web and mobile to enable brands to be able to leverage omni channel sales via its platform.
Poketshop app - http://bit.ly/1T9A1yO
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