How Meesho Became the 3rd Largest Ecommerce Giant in India

Meesho is one of the fast growing e-commerce start ups in India. Currently it has a valuation of Rs. 30,000 crore. Thats incredible right? Let us explore the business case study of Meesho. How did it became the fast growing ecommerce start up.

Meesho started life as a reseller app, but today it is the 3rd largest ecommerce company in India.

Meesho took advantage of social ecommerce to the extent that no others have thought of before. They pioneered social ecommerce. It is one of those start ups to receive funding from Facebook. Meesho was also selected by Y-Combinator for its famous summer program.

The name Meesho derives from “Meri Shop”.

The founders

Meesho was founded by two IIT graduates – Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal.

They saw an opprtunity to engage the women entrepreneus of India with little to no cost came up with an app to make that happen.

Meesho is headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka.

The Journey

Meesho started as Fashnear. The founders wanted to focus on ecommerce segment.

Originally the founders wanted to send sales executives to customer’s house with three variations of an item. The customer then could pick one of the three and the sales executive would bring the rest two back!

It is not clear why they gave up on the idea, but thank god they did!

Instead they recofused on empowering the women entrepreneur of India. There were thousands of hosewifes and other women who wanted to do something productive but were sitting idle at home.

Most of these women also has strong social networks.

The founders of Meesho hit upon the idea to utilise the vast commercial opportunity in these networks. They created an app where women could easily create a catalogue of products from sellers and re-sell the products to their network.

The idea caught on and Meesho soon became a unicorn – valued above $1 billion.

Meesho’s business strategy

Meesho’s is making use of untapped opportunity and making it easy to set shop for re-sellers.

Typically Indian urban women want to do something in life. But most of them sit idle at home as opportunities of working from home are far and few.

But they have strong social network channels. Meesho is the first company who thought of using these networks commercially and gave the women an opportunity through their app.

Who does not like to earn extra? But to earn from a regular shop is not possible for majority of women and setting up ecommerce is also a painpoint. The sheer amount of work to be done for setting up an ecommerce store is enough to put off most of these women as they have to juggle their houehold responsibilities also.

The Meesho app takes away all the pain points and makes it super easy to create onces ecommerce store in a few clicks. That is not all. Since you are just reselling – you dont have to comply with most of the rules and regulations of an ecommerce store!

Register for an account in Meesho, find items to sale, create a catalogue and then forward the link to your network. If someone buys a product through your link, you get paid! The complete ecommerce transaction – from loading to delivery of items – is taken care of by original seller and Meesho. It is as easy as that!

This easing of doing reselling without any upfront money is a huge game changer in Indian ecommerce history and the reason that Meesho is getting so high a valuation.

Secondly, their have made doing ecommerce a pleasure. The app is structured in such a way to make things easier for newcomers. Many ecommerce apps are hard to understand and there are technical things not uderstood by even seasoned businesses. But Meesho has made to app handling super ease and elements are placed in a way that makes usuing it a breeze.

Meesho has also created a helping community around the app. Go to any other ecommerce site, the top sellers wont even look back at calls for helps from newbies. Not so on Meesho, where community help is always present to guide the newcomers to the platform.

Meesho monetization strategy

Meesho has 0% commission charge from resellers. They do not make any money directly from their resellers. But the money comes in other ways and they do charge something around 10-12% from the original sellers.

Advertisements are one of the ways Meesho makes money. Sellers wishing to rank high on Meesho listings have to pay an advertisement fee. Higher fee equals higher placement.

There is massive transaction data stored with Meesho. This commercial information can be sold to 3rd parties without violating any privacy rules.

Meesho has plans to run consultancy services. With millions of users on the platfor regularly using it, data is generated about what products are sold most, at what time of the year, location of the highest selling goods etc. This data can form part of Meesho’s consultancy services.

Meesho also has plans to create its own products. As mentioned earlier, the massive data gathered by Meesho is handy to create products that sell. This is a big advantage over other competitors.

Meesho marketing strategy

The company’s strength lies in its users. The thousands of housewifes with strong network connections forms the core of Meeshos marketing strategy.

With this huge workforce advertising the platform on their social media, Meesho really does not need any marketing channel.

Meesho also rewards users for recommending its app to other people. This is an attractive option for most work at home moms to earn some revenue. In the process Meesho earns new users and gets brand exposure.

Business lessions from Meesho

Opportunities lie everywhere if you look closely.
Opportunities arise when you solve problems.
Massive problems can be solved and scaled for huge gain.
When you find a pain point effecting a lot of people, therein lies an opportunity to offer a business solution.
Make it easy for people to solve their pain points.