Martjack looking to foray into emerging markets: Interview with Jeetendra Joshi, Martjack

Online retail in India is set to grow from current market size of $1.6 billion to $8.8 billion by 2016, and so the services enabling it. Over the past one year, we have seen the launch of a few SAAS based ecommerce platforms. To understand how the market has been evolving for one of the early evangelizer of ecommerce enabling space, Yourstory spoke to Jeetendra Joshi, Director, Martjack. Below are the edited excerpts of the interaction.

How has been the growth in terms of ecommerce stores leveraging your platform?

We are getting very good response from the retailers as well as from brands. Indian retailers have understood the importance of having online channel; and, there is a vast retailer community in India that wants to have online channel for business. For them, SaaS-based platform like Martjack is an easy vehicle to start the journey in the online space.

There has been a talk that Martjack has raised series A. Can you give some details on this?

We do not comment on speculative rumors.

Can you give some sense about number of stores deactivated from the platform this year (owing to reasons such as lack of funds, traction etc)?

Fortunately, for us, the majority of merchants are offline retailers or brands, where the plan they have is for 3 years and above. This profile of merchants are in the online space to increase their penetration and engagement with buyers and generate sales. They are not online for any other reason. Merchants like these face challenge in generating traction initially but we also help them through our Business Insight program where they can use their offline strength to generate traction. We have very minimal churn rate compared to industry churn rates.

 Take us through the firm’s future and expansion plan.

Our aim is to be the most Merchant Centric company and for that we continue to listen to merchants and keep on improving our product. Currently we have healthy marketshare in India and we will like to increase our marketshare by adding features which Retailers and brands require.

Currently we have a 100+ team in Martjack. We have started our operations in the Middle East, and we are getting very good response from the market. We are also looking at other emerging markets such as South East Asia, North Africa where there is a good demand for ecommerce platform and we are sure that we be able to establish our successfully in those markets.

Recently couple of platforms (such as Zepo and Dhamaal) launched in your space. Don't you think ecommerce enabling market is getting crowded?

Indian ecommerce market is still at a nascent stage. In my opinion, it is a big market, where multiple player can coexist. But, finally, it will depend on how much the merchant is getting benefited because of your solution.