We Want To Make An E-Commerce Platform That Is Easily Accessible And Affordable: Himanshu Chakrawarti 

Himanshu Chakrawarti, CEO of Snapdeal Marketplace, shares in an exclusive interaction with Outlook Business how the e-commerce brand keeps its focus razor-sharp on introducing more ‘value-focused’ or affordable brands by continuing to onboard such merchants and expanding offline retail presence in Tier 2 and 3 cities. 

Edited excerpts 

What has been your focal point at Snapdeal 2.0? 

With our Snapdeal 2.0 strategy, we are constantly in the process of learning from past mistakes and analyzing where the opportunity in the market lies and how we can use it. In the last two and a half years, we have shifted our focus to building customer trust by removing almost 75 per cent of the assortments sold by sellers on a quality basis. 

Our focus has shifted to value-focused brands, where we make sure the product is affordable for Tier 2 and beyond. We want to make an e-commerce platform that is easily accessible and affordable for the masses; hence, around 90 per cent of the goods sold on our platform are under Rs 1,000. We are also working on the end-user experience by continuously improving the components of our offerings to our users, such as the presence of vernacular languages in the app. 

Snapdeal has been one of the earliest companies to engage with ONDC; how is the collaboration in alignment with your Snapdeal 2.0 strategy? 

ONDC has immense scope as it grows further. Our collaboration with the network started when they started commercialising it, and it has been very fruitful for the experience of our buyers and sellers. We in fact encourage our sellers to list on ONDC to be able to get access to a wide audience beyond India’s Tier 1 and also compete in this age of competition. We are now active on both the buyer and seller sides, where we work on the assortment of the other seller partners, which gets visible, and the seller side means our response that gets exposed to other buyers. 

Your overall losses have declined, but the revenue from sales has also gone considerably low?

Our revenue from sales has declined as we are constantly working on rebranding ourselves, and we have removed around 75 per cent of assortments that did not meet the benchmarks of our set criteria. Due to this, there was a decline in sales as a major part of the SKUs had been removed. We are on the practical path towards profitability, and it should reflect in the upcoming quarters. 

We have already onboarded 1200 brands and are adding 800 more brands in the next 6 months, which will balance the revenue. We have also launched two offline retail stores of Stellaro Brands’ Rangita, a D2C ethnic wear brand, in Andhra Pradesh’s Vishakhapatnam and Kakinada. We are planning to expand our offline presence in other parts of India going forward. 

It has been a long time since Snapdeal withdrew the DRHP; are there any plans to go public? Or are you only looking at Unicommerce? 

So, we had decided to go public in 2022, but we had to withdraw our DHRP by the end of 2022 due to the then-existing unfavorable market conditions, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and so on. However, right now our primary journey is all about growth. We will evaluate both private and public options when we have a positive orientation towards the public market. AceVector's Unicommerce on the other hand, has already filed DRHP and is now awaiting the final nod from SEBI in terms of formalities to go public.