ShopClues partners with South Korea to help merchants sell products in India

ShopClues has partnered with a South Korean trade body to enroll 30,000 wholesale merchants, allowing them to sell directly to Indian businesses and consumers through its online marketplace.

ShopClues will provide cataloguing, delivery payment and customer support to members of the Korean International Trade Association (KITA), similar to the terms of a partnership it stitched with Chinese online B2B platform DHgate in May, opening up the Indian market to wholesalers from southeast Asian countries.

Indian merchants do not have many options to buy goods directly from overseas ecommerce platforms. Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group has 4.46 million Indian buyers and sellers registered with Alibaba Wholesale.

But Amazon India’s Global Selling Programme launched in June and eBay’s Powership programme allow only exports by Indian merchants. ShopClues is also in talks with wholesale platforms in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. These alliances are essential for the company to be able to meet its 2015-16 target of $1.5 billion (Rs 10,000 crore) in gross merchandise value, or the total retail price of all the goods sold on its platform.

In financial year 2015, ShopClues achieved GMV of Rs 2,500 crore. “The merchants on-boarded from DHgate as well as KITA are an overlap between our wholesale marketplace for consumers and small businesses as well as private marketplace for B2B sourcing for the 1.25 lakh merchants registered on Shop Clues,” said Sanjay Sethi, cofounder and CEO of the Tiger Global-backed company.

“More importantly, it helps smaller merchants and those in Tier 2 and 3 cities who want to stock up certain goods for their physical retail outlets.”

The Korean merchants will sell products including cosmetics, home and kitchen appliances, electronic goods and car accessories on ShopClues. They will be charged a fee for services provided by ShopClues.

“We do the payment processing, including exchange services, and charge the merchant for it. Apart from this, the fulfilment services are also charged.Access to the ShopClues platform is free,” said Sethi. The turnaround time will be 14-45 days, depending on the volume of an order and whether the products have to be custommade, Sethi said.

On plans for enrolling merchants in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, Sethi said, “Currently, we have not built the entire ecosystem for the SE Asian markets to buy or source from Indian merchants, though we will look at exports going ahead.”