Dealsnow.co.in: An online market place for corporates

Based out of Bangalore, Dealsnow is a benefits and rewards partner for organisations and other closed user groups. The enterprise leverages e-commerce and other technologies to provide these services to its clients and their associates i.e. its employees, customers or members. Corporate employees can purchase quality products and services such as appliances, electronics, mobiles, cameras, holiday packages, jewellery, toys, wellness, flowers, cakes and gifts from well-known brands through a single platform at affordable prices in a convenient and hassle-free way.Co-founders Sagar Chadhuri and Jagadish Velagapudi share more with Anisha Mehta from YourStory.in

Sagar, you and Jagadish always wanted to be entrepreneurs?

My co-founder Jagadish has 15 years of industry experience in technology, corporate finance and operations. I, on the other hand, have worked in areas like analytics, CRM, online advertising and operations. Over the years, we have seen brands and merchants approaching corporates with corporate plans or employee schemes. We have also seen corporates trying to negotiate with these parties to secure better offers for their employees. We then realised that it might be a good idea to create a platform where brands and merchants can interact with corporate and their employees and strike a deal which will be beneficial for both the parties. As corporate are constantly faced with challenges while hiring and retaining good talent, they need to regularly work on their benefits and rewards programs and now they can do so with Dealsnow.

How much capital was required to set up Dealsnow? 

We have invested more than Rs16 lakhs over the last 14 months in Dealsnow. We have entirely bootstrapped this venture.

What are your challenges as an entrepreneur in the e-commerce space?

Few of the challenges we face are similar to what other players in the industry face such as murkiness about commercial taxation regulations and unreliability of the supply chain i.e. poor IT integration, lack of real time inventory data, etc. We did get a slow response to our venture from corporates, suppliers and investors initially given that our approach to the e-commerce business was quite different from the usual B2C model. However, we stuck to our business model and made several tweaks along the way. Thanks to the initial support from our early corporate clients, merchant partners and mentors, we have been able to make reasonable progress over the last one year or so. Also, most websites compete with each other on one parameter which is price but for us, we give equal importance to our service, customisation techniques user experience. Also, we don’t spend money on online advertising or search engine optimization unlike our B2C counterparts but makes it difficult to survive but since we stress on excellent customer service, we have managed to earn and edge over our competitors.

How has the response to your venture been?

We will be reaching out to about quarter of a million employees by the end of this month.30 per cent of the employees in mostly all our client organisations have already signed up for our programs that keeps us going. Our average ticket size for transactions is about five times of mainstream e-commerce websites. We have also garnered a significant share of the employee rewards and recognition budget in many corporate organisations.

How does your supply chain work?

At this point, we do not keep inventory, so everything works on a back-to-back order concept. We promise a certain level of service to our customers and have established similar level of service with our partners. As we scale up further, we will tweak our supply chain model.

Which delivery service and payment gateway do you use?

We use multiple logistics partners depending on the product category, value of product, nature of delivery (regular versus express), etc. Our current payment gateway is CCAvenue.

You are planning to branch out and extend your product portfolio?

We want to build on our relationship with existing clients and expanding our client base. At an appropriate stage of our expansion, we might look at external funding.

Go to www.dealsnow.co.in for further details!