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It’s safe to say that India is witnessing an explosion of creative entrepreneurship. Every other person is starting their own business, selling anything from kawaii handmade phone charms to coastal grandma crochet sweaters. Fuelled by the power and reach of Instagram, this demographic of digital-native entrepreneurs skews younger and younger. But shopping from small businesses on Instagram is all fun and games until you actually have to place an order. Amid a barrage of “pp” enquiries (short for ‘price please’), you have to rush to be the first to book a piece in the comments section. Then you patiently wait for a DM from the seller to confirm your order and share payment details.
As stress-inducing as this process is for customers, it’s not like the entrepreneurs behind these shops are having an easy time either. More often than not, they are manually replying to each comment, addressing queries via DMs and keeping tabs on shipping for upwards of hundreds of orders, all single-handedly. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Enter: The new wave of e-commerce aggregators tailored for small businesses. With a creator-first approach, these platforms are engaging with the confluence of creativity, content, and commerce to forever change our buying patterns.
PRICE PLEASE
A product designer by profession, Nakul Verma came up with the idea of dm2buy when he realised that the Instagram marketplace is a little all-over-the-place. Following small businesses, keeping up with weekly drops, and well, DMing them to buy individual pieces was proving to be a challenge. Add to that the uncertainty about the availability of certain products listed on these accounts. “I thought that having one place where people could discover these drops would be cool,” he says.
“Building a brand used to be hard because advertising on traditional media is expensive. But for Gen Z, building a brand online is second nature; and it is going to be irreversible going forward. However, the challenge is that with so many brands, discovering the ones you like is hard. That’s where dm2buy comes into the picture. We provide tools like a tech pack to help these brands scale up beyond being a hobby project. We also allow discoverability through our curated offline pop-ups, social media features, and our mobile application,” elaborates Verma.
dm2buy offers an app with an in-built mobile shop builder, where businesses can set up their stores and list their products for free. The seven hundred or so businesses that partner with dm2buy span a range of products and aesthetics. From Victorian goth to anime merch, there’s a lot to pick from. Creatives such as tattoo artists can also list their services on dm2buy, and that is what makes it stand apart from more traditional e-commerce portals. The focus is also on putting the spotlight on businesses based in smaller towns, where owners don’t necessarily have the connections or resources to self-promote and ‘blow up’.
“What are we supposed to do, make it or sell it?” asks Niya Chheda, a literature student who first started retailing handmade jewellery over DMs under her label, Nenikaar. She soon ran into familiar problems: repetitive tasks, time-consuming interactions, and unresponsive customers.
She then made the move to set up shop on dm2buy, and says that having the support makes it easier to execute orders.
WEB OF INFLUENCE
Misimi Kashyap, a fashion student, always wanted to make her own buck. But without the technical know-how to manufacture clothes from scratch, or the investment to outsource the work, her initial attempts didn’t pan out. Dissatisfied with what was offered by domestic multi-brand retailers, she would trawl international fashion e-commerce sites to shop for her own wardrobe. When increasing numbers of people began asking her “where’d you get that?”, she decided to start procuring clothes for her brand, Misimi’s Closet, from these same UK-based suppliers.
Her introduction to Zaamo, another e-commerce platform spotlighting emerging homegrown brands, was not as a seller though. Zaamo partners with Gen-Z influencers and fashion content creators who curate shops on their mobile site. Next to product offerings traditionally listed under categories and brands, expect to see pieces under curated umbrellas such as ‘funky Y2K accessories’, ‘easy college fits’, ‘dresses under 999’, and so on. Kashyap, who has a sizeable following on Instagram, initially joined Zaamo in this capacity as an influencer who would make commissions from any products purchased through her shop.
But then it struck her: Why not sell Misimi’s Closet on Zaamo as well? Business picked up, and soon, Kashyap was making more money than she’d imagined. But international shipping came with its own hassles, and Kashyap’s orders got held up at customs multiple times. When customers demanded to know the reason behind the delay, or asked for refunds, Zaamo acted as a buffer for Kashyap: “They were managing customer service for me, which I don’t like doing at all because DMs give me a lot of anxiety.”
If Zaamo’s model of curated shops and commissions sounds a lot like affiliate marketing, that is because it is. Co-founder Rachit Juneja brought his experience with SaaS platforms and influencer marketing to build the platform from the ground up. He explains, “By curating shops on Zaamo, creators are simply doing what they do on Pinterest: grouping things under the same aesthetic or theme. Now that content is a rich world and e-commerce is evolving, you can bring them together in a cost-effective way. And the way to utilise this is via influencers’ content, and then incentivise them as we go along.”
By allowing influencers and content creators to promote brands at their own discretion and pace, Zaamo is bringing autonomy into the often transactional nature of such partnerships.
“It’s about going influencer-first, respecting their choices, giving them a custom domain and not making them seem like a reseller. What that means is that Zaamo has to take a backseat. We’re not pushing them to post and promote links on a set schedule. How they run their shop is totally up to them. Money becomes a secondary part of the reason they continue here; the first reason has to be that they want to do it, and we allow them to find a lot of brands that they love.”
The platform experiences a high amount of browsing, which, in turn, allows Zaamo to collect a lot of data on shopping habits and trending products. “Our conversations with business owners are not just limited to how they can do more with Zaamo. They discuss their plans for upcoming collections, and ask us if they should invest in something particular, or what the demand is like. Zaamo can help businesses by sharing consumer insights,” says Juneja.
COMMUNITY X COMMERCE
In the eleven months since Zaamo was launched, it has seen rapid growth in its network of businesses, creators, and customers. The community aspect is baked into the nature of this ecosystem of commerce.
Taking things one step further, Verma recently hosted an ‘IRL Takeover’ at Khar Social, with pop-up stalls by brands selling on dm2buy. “We felt that there are many exciting brands, but people only know them through their social media content. Many customers probably have the same questions about the owners behind these brands and many even want to meet them in real time. So, we put together this exciting space for people to meet these artists whom they’re usually just familiar with online,” he elaborates.
Nenikaar received a great response at the ‘IRL Takeover’. Inspired by the cyber sigil tattoo style, Chheda has recently been creating chunky silver rings with semi-precious stones. These rings made their way to the Lollapalooza stage on the fingers of singer-songwriter Kayan.
Retailing on a platform like dm2buy gives small businesses greater visibility, and Verma is further expanding on this promise through the launch of a sourcing marketplace where stylists and content creators can discover and source from cool young brands in a streamlined manner. He explains, “When brands choose to facilitate a collaboration with a creator, the creator is directed to make a purchase where they pay upfront. If they deliver the content within the promised timeline, they get a refund. But if they don’t, brands receive the amount and it is considered a purchase. This model allows us to scale the idea of people being able to source from and cross-promote each other.” He believes that discoverability is going to be the future of e-commerce. Much like TikTok, his focus is on building an algorithm that can predict what the consumer might be interested in.
“TikTok will personalise your feed based on your content interaction. We wanted to do something similar, but with products: I want the app to tell me that this is the most exciting thing that I should be buying right now. Traditional e-commerce is highly search-led, where you have to know exactly what you want to buy. However, with newer technologies and more personalised data, the next wave of commerce is going to be discovery-first.”
Aside from helping brands get discovered, Juneja believes that we have a long way to go when it comes to building infrastructure to support small businesses in the longer run. He says, “It seems like the creative boom is here, but it is yet to come because the supporting infrastructure is still very slim. Manufacturing, supply chain management, marketing and sales – these are very real aspects of doing business which every small business owner might not be equipped to handle. When these problems can be outsourced, you will see every crazy idea come to life.”
Chheda would like help with creative packaging: “I have a lot of ideas in my mind but I can’t execute them because I have no resources, so some help with that would be great.” According to her, reliable delivery is also something that is missing.
Speaking from her repeated experiences with delayed deliveries, Kashyap says, “In the past, I have partnered with a few other platforms where the representatives would disappear when things went wrong. I would just like more transparency and a way to communicate and talk things out with the people involved.”
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