Order from Macy’s or Selfridges from the comfort of your home, with Shopyourworld.com
If you love shopping aboard, then now you need not take that flight or lug all that you shop from across continents. You can just sit at home and order everything you like online. When we say international goods, it’s not just electronics that we are referring to, you can take your pick from D&G to Bvlgari perfumes, or order something from Macy’s or Walmart instead. Doing this is ecommerce portal, ShopYourWorld. And in case you cannot find something that you picked up on your last trip abroad, don't worry ShopYourWorld will procure the product and ship it to you.
In other words, ShopYourWorld is an ecommerce site that sells everything from gadgets to grocery and everything in between. The site claims to have more than a million products and over 10,000 brands on their site. “At this juncture there are hardly any competitors in cross-border trade. We are usually the first to launch new products in India like the iPhone 5S, Google Chromecast, Kindle Fire/Paperwhite, Nexus 7 FHD are some of the recent launches first on our site,” says co-founder, ShopYourWorld.com, Sandip Shah.
ShopYourWorld was co-founded by Sandip, who was earlier associated with Elbee Services – a logistics company. He has also helped setup logistics for other major eCommerce companies in India. Sandip looks after the day-to-day business activities with a focus on logistics, operations, marketing, technology and customer service. The other co-founder is Rahil Shah, who has a background in finance and takes care of finance, marketing, technology and business development for the startup. In the past Rahil has been associated with Budget Rent-a-Car and Hover Automotive. They are currently a team of 60 people spread across India, US and Singapore, which mostly comprises of marketing and IT teams.
Business model
ShopYourWorld does not keep any inventory, but is reliant on its various alliances in US and Singapore to source and supply products. The startup also has a physical presence and team in US, who play a major role in sourcing products and managing the logistics there. They have a fulfilment/warehouse facility in the US where the orders are processed and then shipped to India.
The site has fulfilled orders from Tier 1 & 2 cities in India and also claims to have shipped to some rural areas in India. Men from higher middle class and above, aged between 25 – 50 years are typical customers of the site, which Sandip claims has grown 100% YOY since starting. And the average shopping size on the portal is Rs 6000.
Started in July 2010, Sandip claims to have already shipped out a few lakh orders in the last 3 years. Started by bootstrapping, the startup recently raised institutional funding from Singapore National Research Foundation and two VC firms—iGlobe Partners and WaveMaker Labs.
ShopYourWorld offers products across nine categories, and boosts of more than 300,000 SKUs in the electronics/computers & mobile category. That category is also the biggest contributor to their business. “We see a huge demand for any new releases in this category. For example, Nexus 7 FHD tablets, iPhones5S, all new Kindle Paperwhite have outperformed all the other tablets and mobile models,” says Sandip.
Advertising and marketing for ShopYourWorld is done through social media, press and paid advertising. They also use occasions like Black Friday and Oktoberfest to do some awareness activities. ShopYourWorld is also working with the various banks and has strategic alliances with them. SEM, SEO activities and targeted advertising through Facebook is also helping them connect to their niche target customer.
For the future
Talking about the challenges he faced in his journey, Sandip says managing consumer expectation and logistics were tough nuts to crack. However, one of the primary challenges is the low awareness about the possibility of doing international shopping sitting in India. “Most of the market is focussed on buying low value and deal oriented stuff in India. However, because we offer only branded and premium international products people tend to compare them with the local brands,” says Sandip.
They are headquartered in Singapore and this helps Shopyourworld manage cross border trade more easily. “All our purchases are done outside India, and Singapore being one of the top global business hubs with manageable time zones between India and the US serves our purpose well,” says Sandip. The current round of funding is being deployed to improve their technology, back-end and product management capabilities. Also there is a greater focus on hiring the best talent in the technology space.
Other immediate goals set by the startup, include ramping up its customer base, increasing sales, focus on online reputation management and achieving 100% customer satisfaction. They are also looking to raise another round of $15mn funding.
Among the long term goals, developing new methods of payment such as split payments in credit cards and 50% COD is being considered. Entering South East Asian markets like Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia is also on cards, says Sandip.
