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Purplestores provides ‘à la carte’ feature to online retailers addressing design and content painpoints

This is a story of a SaaS ecommerce company who wants to become a reliable technology partner for the new age online sellers in India.

Monday August 29, 2016,

4 min Read

The story began with Amit Jain (Founder and CEO of Purplestores) struck a conversation with a couple who were in search of taking their cosmetics selling business online. Their pain points were the inadequacy to find a reliable, scalable, affordable, minimalistic ecommerce technology partner to create a robust platform.

The need for low cost ecommerce technology solutions stemmed from the discussion. Where an ecommerce business of any size could set up, maintain, and scale their business without having to spend a lot of resources. Per a recent Google report, 10 million sellers are about to go online by 2020, in India.

After serving as a SEO consultant for ecommerce customers in the U.K (Magento became an expert in this service soon after), Amit took his first steps in forming his venture in 2009. Purplestores boasts partnership with many popular retail brands and is driving their ecommerce successes constantly. The invaluable diversity in industry experience coupled with competitive fee structure remains the core USPs of Purplestores.

Amit, an engineer from IIT Delhi, MBA from SP Jain Mumbai comes with valuable work experience with a Fortune 500 company in operations, finance, and risk. Amit is a 6 Sigma BLACK BELT and a LEAN expert. He has been an avid speaker and contributor in the ecommerce arena in India ever since he took the entrepreneurial plunge.

Presently, Purplestores' team strength is 12 and is headquartered in Okhla, Gurgaon.

Bespoke model of service

Purplestores  is basically a SaaS ecommerce platform which provides each individual merchant a separate user account while using the common application and infrastructure. Each business corporation can choose from hundreds of templates to create their website and start selling online almost instantly.

As soon as the merchant signs up, they get a distinctive domain name and an ideal website front end, chosen from predesigned design themes or from the customised theme. The platform is designed to help non-tech savvy sellers/merchants create, customise, and maintain the webstore with ease.

Besides providing designing and content development services at hourly rates, purplestores offers ‘à la carte’ features to build a solid ecommerce platform to sellers. Clients get to pay for what they use. Google Analytics is woven and integrated into the SaaS ecommerce platform making it easy for sellers to form robust digital marketing strategies.

Emolument of clients via Purple Stores

Purplestores is self funded. The company focuses on fashion and grocery ecommerce. Purplestores has succeed in helping acquire more customers for big brands across India, USA, and the UK (BeeBay, ART4U, Brand Alley and Jacaranda living).

The fight for perfection is still on

‘Out of difficulties grow miracles’ Jean de la Bruyere. No journey is without hassles. Purple Stores too faces some challenges.

Purplestores stands with the fact that most Indian sellers are not technically inclined towards ecommerce, hence every aspect of the SaaS ecommerce platform is built minimalistically. The company understands that the sellers core agenda is to develop and innovate product/service sales rather than spend valuable resources on building and managing their webstore.

Purplestores sets up the initial webstore with 20 products, simultaneously training the merchant team to manage the webstore independently. The company offers tech support anytime via phone to help merchants at any given point.

Purplestores team

The core team is constantly working on innovative ways to improve sales and services to become the best SaaS ecommerce platform for Indian sellers.

Moving forward

Purplestores plans to keep enterprise-level functionalities in focus on the strategy that would help them grow to 3000 customers in the coming year from the current 500 registered customers. Another significant strategy is to further technology innovation. They desire to add plug and play 3rd party integrations in their system modulation. India continues to be their market in focus in the current year and plan to go to international markets at a later stage.

Purple Stores have recently launched a “Mobile app” feature for Android and iOS devices. The launch is still in its beta phase which is available for download in the respective stores as “Purplestores Demo App”. Some of the features include - login using Facebook, google session on the device, push notifications to individual/group users allowing merchants for targeted and personalized campaigns.