Lokho Kesamai of Nagaland never thought his traditional recipe-based pickles would travel beyond the north-eastern states. He has been selling stuff like Pork Chunk Pickle, Dried Wild Apple, Chicken Chunk Pickle and Dried Gooseberry, among other things, for the past seven years but has mostly catered to the seven sister states.
“Now, I am getting orders from places like Mumbai and Delhi also. Although the bulk of the orders is still from the neighbouring states, there is a slow and steady rise in demand from other states,” says the 32-year-old founder of Hornbill Food Marketing.
Kesamai did not open offices in the ‘mainland’—as he refers to the states beyond the Northeast—nor did he appoint sales or marketing staff anywhere. All he did was register as a seller on NE Origins, a Sikkim-based social commerce platform.
Kesamai is part of a growing tribe of business people or entrepreneurs—known simply as sellers in the social commerce arena—who have taken their businesses digital in the past couple of years to overcome the challenge of connecting with customers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Simply put, social commerce refers to commerce or trade done with a built-in element of tech-enabled social interaction. The interaction could be in the form of chats or even audio or video calls between the seller and the potential buyer. At times, the interaction could also be in the form of pre-recorded videos to ensure that the buyer can have a real-life shopping experience.
While many individual sellers have started using social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook to market their wares, a large number of social commerce sites have also mushroomed across the country. Such social commerce platforms are playing a far bigger role than Instagram or Facebook, as they offer a lot of handholding and technology-driven tools to empower their sellers, a majority of who may not have even a basic understanding of the digital ecosystem.
The growing importance of social commerce can be gauged from the fact that earlier this year, a report by consulting major Accenture stated that the global social commerce industry is expected to grow three times as fast as traditional e-commerce to $1.2 trillion by 2025. It has pegged the current size of global social commerce at $492 billion.
“Growth is predicted to be driven primarily by GenZ and millennial social media users, accounting for 62 per cent of the global social commerce spending by 2025,” it says in its report, while highlighting the fact that around 3.5 billion people—representing over 44 per cent of the global population—use social media and on average, consumers spend around two and a half hours daily on social media platforms.
“We started NE Origins during the pandemic in January last year and in less than a year, we have 400 sellers and are registering a month-on-month growth of 15 per cent in our revenues,” says Rewaj Chettri, Founder & CEO, NE Origins. Catering exclusively to entrepreneurs from the north-eastern states, NE Origins has on its platform sellers with many indigenous products like wild honey from Nagaland, turmeric from Meghalaya and black rice from Manipur, among other things.
While one may feel that NE Origins has a very unique proposition, hence it has been able to clock such traction in terms of on-boarding new sellers, the unanimous view prevalent among social commerce platforms is that there is a largely untapped segment of sellers just waiting to initiate their social commerce journey. “We have 700,000 stores registered on our platform of which 200,000 are active on an average every month. We have been registering a growth of around 20 per cent on a monthly basis,” says Jasmeet Thind, Co-founder of Coutloot, which features among the largest home-grown social commerce platforms, according to data from Tracxn. In terms of sales, Coutloot is doing around `65 crore every month with more than 700,000 transactions, adds Thind.
A similar story is developing at Indore-based Kiko, which has turned social commerce into a live video shopping experience. “The Kiko Live section was launched around January end and we have already crossed 10,000 sellers on our platform. We are signing up around 200-300 sellers every day. We might sign up 10,000 more in this month alone,” says Alok Chawla, Co-founder & COO, Kiko. “In terms of number of buyer-seller interactions happening daily, we are seeing 1,000 calls per day where the call time exceeds a minute. Currently, we are doing `50 lakh a month GMV (gross merchandise value) but the real number would be much higher, as sellers have the option of using third-party payment gateways as well.”
Incidentally, the pandemic has proved to be a great enabler for the social commerce segment, a fact corroborated by the significant jump in the number of sellers that have come on board such platforms in the past couple of years. Small sellers earlier were not very digital savvy but they have been virtually forced to embrace technology, says Chawla.
The bet365 bonus code 2018n Twist
What is the most common trait of an average bet365 bonus code 2018n shopper? Ask anyone, anywhere in bet365 bonus code 2018 and the prompt reply would be a love for bargaining.
While online e-commerce has seen a huge jump in volume and reach, it is all about searching for a product and buying it. There is no human or social element in the whole online shopping experience and that is where social commerce is fast creating a niche.
bet365 bonus code 2018n social commerce players have been quick to understand the average bet365 bonus code 2018n shopper’s psyche and consequently added interesting and innovative features to recreate the physical or real-life shopping experience in the digital world.
Coutloot, for instance, has built an automatic bargaining feature on its platform that provides the buyer a pre-set bargain price within a chat box. The buyer can then select and quote a favourable price, which he or she thinks is fair for the product. Furthermore, its chat and bargaining feature allows buyer-seller negotiations in their respective native languages as the translation is done on a real-time basis.
Illustration by Raj Verma 
