In recent years, social media has emerged beyond just a networking tool and is now considered a platform enabling business for the Direct to Consumer (D2C) segment. The key drivers enabling Social Commerce in India include tech-enabled marketplaces, logistic services, and of course social media, to name a few.
There are nearly 200 million active social media users in India currently, and the number is expected to grow to around 370 million by 2022. Categories such as fashion, consumer healthcare, baby products, food, and beverage industry, beauty, personal care, and women have gained a huge spike in the D2C category where the consumer buying pattern has shifted from high-end brands to Glocal Brands.
Social media emerged as an indispensable tool for businesses as D2C brands use this platform to find and engage with customers, drive sales through advertising, know about customer trends, and offering customer support. Last year due to emergence of COVID which gave India a huge spike in terms of Businesses shifting online confirmed the presence of the D2C sector which was earlier less recognized. Here is the list of Top New-Age tech platforms enabling D2C Brands to scale their Business.
Shiprocket
Shiprocket is one of India’s largest e-commerce shipping and enablement platform for SMBs. The technology powers shipping and fulfillment for SMEs, D2C retailers, and social commerce sellers in India. With 20 courier partners on board, the brand enables pan-India as well as international shipping deliveries. Its shipping solutions are available across 27,000 pin codes within India and 220 countries across the world. Shiprocket is on a mission to create a seamless logistics data platform that connects retailers, carriers, and consumers across national and international locations.
In addition to offering Shipping Services, Shiprocket also provides a technology stack to help retailers integrate their shopping websites on Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, Zoho, and others for workflow, inventory, and order management. Today, Shiprocket is the force behind the country’s 1.5 lakh sellers who generate a GMV of more than $500M annually on the platform. The brand delivers packets to nearly 25M consumers annually and is growing 3X year on year.
Meesho
Meesho, short for “meri shop” (My Shop), is India’s most trusted reseller platform and India’s first startup to receive investment from Facebook. Meesho is an application that helps an individual or small business enterprise to start their business from home with zero investment.
Founders Vidit Atrey & Sanjeev Barnwal had an ideology that enabled physical stores to take their inventory online and sell through social media channels and in 2017 Meesho turned into India’s first online distribution channel for long-tail products, providing an opportunity for individual resellers to sell these products on Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram and other social networks.
Launched in 2004, with a motive of communicating & sharing thoughts and ideas, Facebook with more than 2.45 billion users helps businesses to advertise and make the demands & orders of their products not only on the local level but also globally.
One of the most demanded communicable platform has now turned a place for business growth, Influencers to influence their market by posting ads, new product announcements & gave the ability to consumers to directly contact the suppliers of their products through personal messages on Whatsapp, Messenger & Instagram.
WhatsApp is a well-known American freeware, cross-platform centralized messaging and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by Facebook, Inc. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, share images, documents, user locations, and other content.
In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app targeted at small business owners, called WhatsApp Business, to allow companies to communicate with customers who use the standard WhatsApp client. Sooner the service became the world’s most popular application for D2C Brands or small sellers who now can connect with their target audience personally and scale their business with ease due to the high customer base of the application.
