How an AI driven logistics startup is helping small ecommerce players

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Shiprocket is a data-driven courier aggregation platform, that helps small and medium-sized eCommerce businesses offer faster and cheaper shipping for their orders. Saahil Goel, Gautam Kapoor, and Vishesh Khurana teamed up to launch the venture in 2016. “Since then, we have helped over 30,000 businesses ship faster, cheaper and easier to their consumers giving a world-class shipping experience,” says Saahil Goel, CEO & Co-founder, Shiprocket. He points out that shiprocket clocked one million monthly shipments in June with annual GMV of over US$ 250 million. Currently, Shiprocket ships to 220 countries and across 26,000 PIN codes in India with 15 courier partners onboard. “We aim to triple our active sellers to reach 50,000 by the end of this fiscal and are targeting three million monthly shipments by the end of 2020,” mentions Goel.

The startup targets all direct-to-consumer sellers in the eCommerce market which make about 30-40 per cent of overall eCommerce shipments today. “The D2C commerce market in India is around US$ 10 BN in value and is growing 30 per cent YoY,” states Goel, adding that sellers in D2C are largely comprised of:

• Social sellers: Over one million sellers sell through Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp to buyers using conversational commerce. These sellers do not have access to robust eCommerce shipping and end up using retail couriers with poor SLAs and no option for COD. “Shiprocket allows social sellers to use a mobile app to instantly book shipments and get access to a large network of eCommerce couriers with fastest shipping options along with an ability to offer COD,” adds Goel.
• Website sellers: Over 200K active eCommerce websites exist in India today who use sub-optimal ways to ship their orders to their consumers. Goel reminds that there is significant operational overhead in shipment tracking, responding to customer queries and issues around delivery delays and delivery failure. “Shiprocket alleviates these issues by bringing its world-class tech platform with built-in workflows and automated consumer communication to allow high loyalty and a better experience for both shippers as well as their consumers,” he avers.

Shiprocket has spearheaded several technological innovations in its space by keeping problems faced by SMBs at the centre of innovation. “We are using data science in everything we do, in every internal and external workflow we run and in almost every product feature we delivery. This allows us to offer an experience to SMBs that was so far available only to larger B2C horizontal marketplaces. We believe in automation very strongly and believe that SMBs can derive a lot of efficiency by using our platform,” states Goel.

The company is rapidly expanding its channel integrations with shopping carts, inventory and POS solutions as well as its courier network by creating reach in tier 3, tier 4 and tier 5 cities. “This will allow us to cater to the next generation of eCommerce sellers and buyers. We are also heavily focused on building products for the social seller category as well as in the omnichannel retail category,” he avers.

Reminding that logistics in India has been an unorganised and scattered segment, Goel points out that there is a large gap that exists between SMBs selling online and the right set of eCommerce focused courier companies. “Shiprocket provides hassle-free shipping with the lowest shipping rates to ensure that small sellers can scale their business without taking on additional overhead while ensuring the highest levels of consumer delight and loyalty,” he sums up.

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