Delhi-based Shyplite wants ecommerce businesses to say bye-bye to logistic woes
Shyplite lets e-tailers automate logistics and increase efficiency in shipments by providing a single window shipping platform integrated with multiple carriers.
There was a time when only big players owned the ecommerce space in India, but the segment has lately seen the entry of many small, medium, and even individual players.
If you ask most ecommerce players what their biggest challenge is, chances are most would say logistics. Sugam Jain, CEO and Co-founder of Shyplite, will agree, not because his company has a SaaS solution to offer for this pain point, but because he was an ecommerce seller himself.
In 2014, when Sugam started his ecommerce store focused on baby products and toys as a seller on all major ecommerce marketplaces, he was able to scale the business to 150 orders per day, but the company could not keep pace with growth as all his time went into logistics management. He soon realised existing logistics solutions did not fit business requirements or budgets.
Sugam tells YourStory that the only available solutions in the market were online aggregators. Sellers could see a list of shipping companies, but they were supposed to select the carrier based on different prices, time, or follow up with the seller, and calculate carrier-wise costs, among others. He felt that a gap existed in logistics management.
Sugam, who has been an entrepreneur since the age of 16, joined hands with his college friend Parinay Itkan (Co-founder and COO), and his cousin Nisschal Jain (Co-founder and Chairman) to introduce a service-centric logistics platform for retailers.
The trio started working on building a SaaS platform in 2015, and Shyplite went live in June 2016 with a team of six, including the three co-founders.
Shyplite is an automation platform that enables retailers and e-retailers to manage their logistics by providing a single window "shipping gateway" integrated with multiple carriers.
Parinay clarifies, that it’s not aggregation, but automation.
“Based on data, we use carriers in the backend so that the seller does not have to do anything,” he says. Under the platform, there is only a single pricing for sellers, and there is no minimum shipment cost or subscription plan. Sellers can simply sign in and start using the platform, he explains.
Currently, most small to medium retailers in the country work with manual processes when it comes to logistics.It takes a lot of time for the retailer to manually book, track, and manage all these shipments with multiple courier or logistics companies.
“What we are essentially trying to do is provide businesses with a platform to eventually centralise, digitise, and automate their entire logistics process and save time and lots of headaches,” he adds.
The industry landscape
The volatile growth in the online shopping market has given a huge boost to the ecommerce logistics segment. The $35 billion ecommerce market is projected to grow 25 percent a year for the next five years and exceed $100 billion by 2022, according to a report by tech industry body Nasscom and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
The report also reveals that ecommerce is expected to not just create regular corporate jobs but also increase employment in allied industries like logistics and warehousing.
The ecommerce logistics space has an array of companies like Shiprocket, Wow Express, NSE-listed Gati, Cogoport, Locus, Ecom Express, FarEye, Alibaba-backed XpressBees, Delhivery, Rivigo, and Loadshare.
However, Parinay feels that Delhi-based Shyplite stands out in terms of the both, product and services, and names only Zepo Courier as competition.
“Our product is designed from the perspective of a seller, being sellers ourselves. We offer simple single pricing along with 10+ courier partners, automated carrier selection, automated tracking, reverse logistics, and operational support to our clients,” Sugam says.
Parinay adds that Shyplite covers more than 20,000 pincodes in India, whereas all major players cover around 17,000- 18,000.
In terms of Shyplite's client base, e-tailers make up a major chunk of their sellers. However, it also caters to offline retailers, manufacturers, and distributors. “Users come from different categories and size of business, ranging from a housewife or student selling through social media, established ecommerce websites like gifting brand Bigsmall, a manufacturer of gourmet jams like The Gourmet Jar to corporate brands like Mensxp and PopXO,” Parinay says.
“We have clients who have scaled from doing 5-10 orders a day to over 100 orders a day within a span of two-three months due to the ease of logistics management,” he adds.
Growth trajectory
Shyplite started gaining traction very early, hitting 1,000 registrations in less than 100 days of its launch. The company claims to have more than 15,000 users on its platform.
“We registered 50 percent quarterly growth in terms of a number of sellers and shipments processed, moving shipments of value worth more than Rs 50 crore in the Diwali 2018 season alone. We are now targeting 1 million shipments a month by Diwali 2019,” Parinay says.
The bootstrapped startup expanded to a team of 50 in two years. Going ahead, the company aims to cater to offline retailers along with online small and big businesses.
