Limeroad.com, an eCom Portal For Women Is Bullish About The Future
Limeroad.com is a portal targeted at women and offers products only for the fairer sex. It offers a variety of products like apparel, beauty products, bags, accessories and footwear. The company has been co-founded by Suchi Mukherjee and Manish Saxena and is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Venture Partners. They have been operational for the last six months. Suchi recently spoke to YourStory.in about the future plans for the entity. “We want to make Limeroad the most delightful brand in South East Asia and then extend that experience to other countries in the world,” says Suchi ambitiously.The portal is well-known among women and a lot of traffic coming to the site is from Facebook. Suchi insists that the
customers they get on the site are very different from normal eCommerce customers and there have been a lot of times since launch that some customers have purchased items worth more than Rs. 15,000 – Rs. 20,000 on the site. Quiz Suchi about these big spenders and even she is baffled: “am not sure where they are coming from,” she laughs. The average ticket size of spends on Limeroad today is in the region of Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000. They recently partnered with a shoe brand to do the national launch of a new range of products and Suchi claims that 20% of this newly launched range was sold within just two weeks of debuting on Limeroad.com.
While Suchi is happy with the progress the site has made, there are some key areas of focus for Limeroad in the coming days. These include their capital light model, vendor relationships, better curation, more exclusivity and building more traffic. The capital light model means Limeroad doesn’t have any inventory and therefore doesn’t require any capital commitment from a brand. Limeroad is also depending on its online customer community to do the curation of products. “This not only increases customer engagement with the brand, but also is a key aspect of cost control. Besides generating community-led content which most brands pay for, it also generates community-led ‘freshness’ for the brand,” explains Suchi.
Limeroad is also creating a network of vendors who can supply them with local products which will be exclusive to the site. 50% of the brands that Limeroad retails are large flagship brands, and now they want to get the other 50% to be exclusive to the portal. The portal’s focus on social shopping and its integration with Facebook, allows shoppers on Limeroad to share their purchase with friends. This in turn helps build conversation for the product purchased as well as the vendor site. This strategy has helped Limeroad increase its traffic upto 50% month-on-month and get more repeat customers.
On the one hand is the positive growth story and on the other hand are the normal problems that plague a startup. Suchi is scouting for promising, good talent to join her 40-member team and today considers that one of her biggest challenge in moving forward. The first round of funding received by the venture has been utilised to higher the best talent to join Limeroad. The startup is also looking for investors to help them continue their growth story.