With 100K SKUs and 25K transactions, eShopbox aspires to drive B2B fashion e-commerce in India
While we see plenty of vertical plays in consumer-facing e-commerce space, only a handful of startups followed vertical approach in e-commerce enablement (B2B) space. Of late, e-commerce enablement is largely dominated by horizontal players like Martjack, Shopify, KartRocket, Zepo and Buildabazaar.
They power e-stores across various verticals like apparel, food, jewellery, and electronics, among others. Unlike aforementioned players, eShopbox focuses only on fashion labels.
It was started in July 2014 with a mission to provide customer-centric solutions to fashion labels of all varieties. The company had a humble beginning in 2012. They were basically consultants to fashion labels, helping them establish an online presence, and sell online through fashion retailers.
“Over a period, we realised that these retailers lost focus on their merchandise as they had to dedicate a lot of resources to manage their e-commerce channel. The backend operations of these brands could not keep up with managing and stabilising e-commerce; hence, most of them failed to leverage the platform,” says Mayur Karwa, Founder of eShopbox, an IIT, Bombay alumnus.
After sensing this gap, eShopbox decided to expand its capabilities. It formed a strategic and technical team to offer complete e-commerce solutions for fashion brands. Their intent was to enable labels to provide customer-centric experiences.
Primarily, the company offers a complete package of technological and strategic solutions to fashion e-commerce labels. “We want the brands to concentrate on their core business objectives, and leave the e-commerce aspects to us,” says Mayur.
The biggest challenge for fashion brands that want to successfully sustain on e-commerce is to dedicate a lot of resources to create, maintain and analyse their platforms. Dedicating a large team to leverage e-commerce needs a huge investment and a pool of highly skilled technical talent. “These two factors dictate the success of any e-commerce wing of a brand,” points Mayur.
The leadership team at eShopbox has witnessed brands failing to leverage and maintain e-commerce platforms due to lack of quality resources. “This is where eShopbox can work as a technology partner with fashion labels. There are numerous challenges within e-commerce which need constant attention, strategy and innovation, which are eShopbox's forte,” adds Mayur.
With 45 people on the team, eShopbox has shipped over 16K pieces of products in the month of April 2015. Based on the current client structure and talks to bring more people onboard, it is estimated to sell around 25,000 quantities in the month of May 2015 (number yet to come).
The platform has over 100,000 items in stock from 22 brands ranging over 2,000 different styles. At present, it has 48 clients from the Delhi NCR, Jaipur, Ludhiana and Banaras regions that’ll go live in the next fashion season. Besides, creating web stores for fashion brands, the company also help in dealing with marketpalces.
eShopbox works on a revenue-sharing model. This sets them apart from the competition, and hugely favours the fashion brands.
The company has on-boarded major fashion manufacturing hubs in India such as Ludhiana, Tirupur, Jaipur, along with Mumbai and Bangalore. It’s also working with two international fashion brands that'll be launching in India soon through all major e-commerce marketplaces, as well as an exclusive e-commerce store.
Managing e-commerce has always been a challenging capital-intensive game for fashion brands (SMEs) who depend a lot on brick and mortar presence. While there are plenty of options for creating website, logistics and CRM, no (and correct us if I we’re wrong) player offers end-to-end platform for managing e-commerce. eShopbox cuts through noise (competition) with its one-stop e-commerce solution for fashion brands.