Home-cooked food marketplace Imly.in launches Facebook stores for its chefs
From loving his mom’s cooking to taking that as an inspiration to startup – Abhishek Singh has made good progress with Imly.in. The venture started operations earlier this year in March 2013 and has since then grown from strength to strength. Imly is a Mumbai based startup that connects home chefs with prospective customers. People can order home cooked food from the Imly site to be delivered to their place of choice.
Talking about the store, Abhishek Singh, co-founder Imly said: “Setting up the Facebook store is extremely simple. With just two clicks, the chefs have their entire Imly store ported and linked to their FB page. Moreover, they can manage both these stores just by managing their Imly store. Any change that they make in their store on Imly is immediately reflected in their Facebook stores as well.”
The idea behind creating Facebook stores, says Abhishek was to improve engagement between chefs and customers. “As a platform, we work to drive buyers to Imly as a whole but we cannot guarantee orders for any chefs. We do believe that individual success depends a great extent on one’s own efforts to promote their store. As a platform our aim is to provide our chefs with all the tools and services that they need to help spread the word,” he says. Most Imly chefs are quite active on Facebook and have been engaging with people in their own way, the Imly store on FB can help them therefore connect better.
On the Facebook stores, customers can purchase and checkout directly and also be up to date about the chefs' latest offerings. The stores have been built based on feedback from the chefs on the platform and is the outcome of a poll conducted by Imly. Orders placed through Facebook are still routed through Imly. “Having chefs promote their pages and stores through Facebook means indirect promotion for Imly as well. The promotion that can be achieved through the hands of our 90-odd chefs spreading the word and reaching out to their individual networks will definitely be greater than what we can achieve ourselves,” reasons Abhishek. One of the first campaigns that Imly has done using the FB stores was for Rakshabanda, where chefs could select any item they wanted to offer as Rakhi (special) item, and which can then be prominently displayed in their FB store.
