“Thousand new stores a week,” Harley Finkelstein, Shopify CPO on India market
Shopify’s suite of offerings enables small business owners to sell online. With Shopify you can create an ecommerce store in a few minutes. World over, Shopify powers 60,000 online stores.We at YourStory.in recently caught up with Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s Chief Product Officer, to understand their experience in India since the time they entered the market in June.
On Shopify’s India entry
In the next few years ecommerce in India is bound to grow 55% yoy, and that is larger than anywhere else in the world. Ecommerce growth coupled with the fact that there is a surge of small businesses in India, means that India is a huge market for us to have a product offering and a strong on-ground presence.
Shops on Shopify
Last week alone we had a 1,000 new stores created on Shopify in India, which is amazing. This is a lot more than what we expected the reach to be. We are really inspired by how creative some of the stores are. And many of these stores did not exist a few months back, and now they are all set out to build great brands using Shopify platform. This is really encouraging for us.
Some of the interesting stores to check out would be:
Thebeachcompany.in (buy swimwear online)
parisera.com (buy Rasvihar, Sarangi, and Babyrasa brands online)
sushiyaonline.in (order sushi online)
vellvette.com (beauty product samples)
atisundar.com (buy sarees and salwars online)
itokri.com (buy indeginious things online)
postergully.com (buy posters online)
fabmart.com (buy premium products online)
yellowfashion.in (Indian wear for women)
The packages are priced anywhere between Rs 818 per month to Rs 9,939 per month depending on the services you seek.
Similarities between India and Canada markets
What we have seen is unlike in the US or in Singapore. In India, small businesses need a lot of help when it comes to setting up their store, which is great for us because the ecosystem in India is similar to what we have seen in our home country Canada. In the US or Singapore, people want to do everything completely on their own.
It is great to see these similarities between Indian and Canadian markets for us at Shopify. We are right now working with agencies and freelancers, and we would love to work with more of them to help more and more small businesses in India build their online stores.
We have a partnership with SingTel in India and we also have a team sitting in Delhi. But considering how entrepreneurial India is, we will soon have our team present in other cities as well. We want to stay close to the Indian market and understand the needs and challenges of small businesses to help them, and we can achieve that only by our teams being here.
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