Mumbai | 2nd June 2020: As the COVID19 pandemic made the movement of retail products difficult in the Indian offline market, Mumbai-based social e-commerce start-up and offline-to-online enabler Coutloot brought 53k new offline retailers from across the country on its platform during the protracted lockdown. As part of its seller statistics insight during the coronavirus pandemic, the platform reported that almost 72% of the sellers leveraging Coutloot’s extensive offline seller network to deliver goods were from central and north India.
Leveraging the power of AI to automate product cataloguing and listing, Coutloot has been solving a critical problem, helping India’s burgeoning offline sellers sell online. While various government authorities are taking steps to curb the spread of Covid-19, this is a small gesture of the brand to fight together against the growing situation.
Coutloot has listed 21% grocery and vegetable shops,39% essential care shops, 27% fashion and lifestyle stores, 12% electronics stores and 1% other new stores on its O2O platform during the lockdown. It recorded an almost 193% increase in its new seller category, primarily from tier 1 and tier 2 cities where it took an average of 2.8 days for the sellers to receive their first order. On average, 69% of the new sellers shared their product links directly to the customers via WhatsApp with a 91% chat response rate.
Meanwhile, highlighting the buyers’ statistics, analysts observed that consumers from Mumbai ordered the most number of vegetables. While essential care items made the most of the online shopping carts of a vast surfeit of consumers in North India, Southern India accounted for the highest number of sales of fashion and lifestyle items. The buyers brought an average of 2.1 products with an average ticket purchase of INR 583. sanitisers, masks, vegetables, hand wash and soaps remained at the forefront of the most searched items
Speaking on the growth prototype, Jasmeet Thind, Co-founder, Coutloot, said, “While businesses have suffered and lives have been affected during the extended lockdown, the pandemic has had positive effects on many of India’s burgeoning offline sellers. Being on board with us during these unprecedented times has helped them flourish their businesses. Going further, we are determined to leverage the best of cutting-edge technology in helping more small offline sellers add a consistent revenue stream by selling online and who knows we might change the way they do business forever.”
