When Amazon entered the Indian market in 2014-15, the country’s ecommerce space saw a shift in the market sentiment — even though startups like Flipkart and Myntra had made their presence felt.
Amazon’s entry brought a lot more customers to the online marketplace, lured with heavy discounts, the promise of timely delivery, and service assurance. This led to more consumers buying products online as they started to develop trust in sellers selling on the online marketplace. This, in turn, convinced more sellers to sell online and investors to put their money in ecommerce startups.
Ecommerce solutions provider also started as an online seller in 2015, sourcing products locally and selling them online.
In the process, the startup realised that a lot of gaps existed in the technology solution and infrastructure that needed to be addressed to enable small businesses to sell their products online.
“That’s when we decided to focus on our strengths and built out a technology platform which can help people sell online profitably and very efficiently,” Founder and CEO Punit Gupta tells YourStory.
He founded the Bengaluru-headquartered company with Swati Jindal, with whom he had previously worked at TradeStreet — a platform he had developed for stock traders to network.
In January 2020, the company elevated Himanshu Gupta and VR Deepak to co-founder roles.
What does it do
EasyEcom offers omnichannel solutions for ecommerce businesses and sellers in the form of an operating system. It provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for many services such as accounting, analytics, and reconciliation tools to detect discrepancies, among other things, with a core focus on inventory and warehouse management.
EasyEcom has partnered with marketplaces players such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, Meesho, Ajio, and logistics companies like DTDC, DHl, FedEx, BlueDart, through which sellers can integrate their services.
It provides over 150 ready-to-use integrations for stock management, warehousing, and order management.
Growth
The pandemic forced everybody to stay at home, and led them to start ordering almost everything online.
“That growth in ecommerce, which was slated for the next 10 years, instead, happened within a matter of 18-24 months,” says Punit.
This also accelerated the growth of ecommerce companies such as direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands like beauty and personal care brand Mamaearth — which turned into a unicorn recently, lifestyle brand Rustorange, and food brand Epigamia.
This accelerated adoption of the ecommerce marketplace and growth of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands and sellers had a ripple effect on enablers like EasyEcom.
“That accelerated our growth as well. We have gone from a small team two years ago to a rapid expansion in terms of the team size, offices, and capability,” Punit explains.
He adds the startup’s team grew by almost three times. With close to 150 members to be added in the next few months, EasyEcom plans to become a 200-member team.
At present, EasyEcom’s technology stack can process five million orders per day, which is 60 percent up from last year.
During the pandemic, the company’s revenue grew more than three times. From a turnover of Rs 0.7 crore in financial year (FY) 2019, the startup reported revenue growth of Rs 2.2 crore in FY 2021.
Punit says the company has been profitable for the last two years, primarily due to customer subscriptions.
With many people still working from home, EasyEcom is planning to open more regional offices “so that people can come into office without really having to relocate to a headquarter branch in Bengaluru,” Punit says. The startup has already opened offices in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and plans to open more soon.
IndiaMart investment
In December 2021, IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd invested Rs 13.35 crore to buy 26.01 percent stake in the startup “ in line with the long-term objective of offering various SaaS-based solutions for businesses,” the company said in an exchange filing.
“The IndiaMART partnership is very valuable for us because along with the money, they also bring in the know-how to work with small and medium enterprises in India, which nobody knows better than IndiaMART,” says Punit.
The startup is looking forward to the information exchange, especially the know-how of acquiring more customers and servicing them at scale.
Prior to this, EasyEcom raised an undisclosed initial angel funding from a group of SaaS entrepreneurs including Aneesh Reddy of Capillary Technologies and Ambarish Gupta of Knowlarity Communications. Later, it secured a growth round from Amistad Venture, an early-stage fund.
Plans ahead
In the last year, EasyEcom says its customer portfolio has tripled to about 2,000 by onboarding brands including Mondelez, Borosil, Swiss Military, and Tata Cliq — most of whom are based in India. The startup also has a presence in the US, the UK, and South Asia.
“Our next target will be to try to deepen our presence further in the Middle East and Southeast Asia,” Punit says.
He is optimistic about the growth in the ecommerce industry. “Once you are selling online, you cannot survive without technology,” he says.
“We will see a very steep growth curve for everyone who’s supplying some sort of technology solution,” he adds.
The company is aiming for a 10x growth in the clientele in the next two to three years.
