Bengaluru, March 04, 2016: About AskMe Brand
The AskMe brand has a legacy of over three decades of working with sellers and SMEs across the country. With the launch of AskMe, the brand’s Yellow Pages business transitioned online thereby ensuring that information relating to any and every seller enrolled with the AskMe brand is readily available. AskmeBazaar.com was launched with the objective of providing merchants with a platform to enable them to transact online. AskmeBazaar is an online bazaar with many stores from across India where buyers can search, compare and buy the products of their choice from sellers across India or from local sellers around their location or even find shops nearby.
Inspiration behind Grow With Us. AskmeBazaar.com
AskMe brand has a relationship with more than 14 million businesses across the country. While working with businesses for decades, we realized that there is no existing online platform that enables sellers to connect and engage with one another.
When we conceptualized Grow With Us. AskmeBazaar.com, we wanted to disrupt the status quo and go beyond what everyone has been doing in this space. ‘Grow With Us’ was conceptualized with the intent to connect with all online sellers across the country on a single platform. The objective was to create a collaborative community where sellers can interact with each other, share their growth stories, discuss best practices and provide tips to scale up a business. It has been designed to be a platform of the sellers, by the sellers and for the sellers.
Grow With Us: An Online Seller Community and the Difference it is making in the Ecommerce Space?
Acknowledging the gap that existed with regards to a “seller community” portal, AskmeBazaar.com launched a new destination for the sellers with the URL-http://growwithus.askmebazaar.com/. Grow With Us’ is today a community portal for the sellers from across the country where they can come and connect, interact, share and gather valuable insights with each other about their learnings, best practices, trends, challenges, etc. It is an interactive platform wherein through videos the sellers can voice their concerns, their experiences and explain how they are able to manage various aspects of online commerce and adapt accordingly to grow their business online.
The portal also has informative content in the form of articles and infographics on the website talking about things like the Indian economy in general, the ecommerce industry, industry findings, inspirational stories from entrepreneurs and a lot more. The help center on the portal has FAQs, Seller Training Video and an informative checklist for the sellers to help them on their AskmeBazaar selling experience. It is a content-rich destination for sellers where they can learn anything and everything around e-commerce and various aspects of selling online. We are also extensively promoting this new portal across all major social channels to initiate conversations across sellers throughout India.
As per a Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofA-ML) report, India’s e-commerce market is expected to witness significant upswing in the coming years and is all set to become a $220 billion industry by 2025.The number of shoppers is also likely to touch 530 million in the e-commerce market in India. Sellers will have to adapt to these ever changing market dynamics and try and leverage it to the advantage of their business.
While it is extremely important to nurture the customer facing aspect of the e-commerce business, it becomes imperative to focus on the seller side of the business as well. We, at AskmeBazaar understood that there existed a gap here for seller when it came to a community platform for the seller community. ‘Grow With Us’ intends to bridge this gap. It is not just another online seller platform but a seller community in the truest sense of the word. We hope to build this as a platform that serves as a repository of information on anything with regards to doing business online. The differentiator here will be the voice of the seller, who will share their experiences and learnings with other sellers.
In what way will it help the traditional consumers? How will it help create a new cadre of consumers?
Today, the sellers using online platforms are not only limited to those located in tier-1 cities of India. We have witnessed a huge traction in the tier-2, 3 and 4 cities. More and more sellers located in smaller cities and towns of India are realizing the opportunity offered by e-commerce and opting to enrol themselves with online portals, with the objective of enhancing their customer base.
GrowWithUs.AskmeBazaar.com has been designed to connect, engage and empower sellers located across the length and breadth of the country. We believe that as the long tail of sellers learn from fellow sellers and adopt best practices, they will in turn be able to serve the online buyers in a more efficient manner.
‘Grow With Us’ aspires to empower the online sellers so they are able to ensure customer delight with every transaction. It aims to educate sellers located across the country, thereby being a partner in their growth story.
What is the Vision and the Next Level Growth Perspective?
We plan to scale up the ‘Grow With Us’’ initiative across all existing AskMe platforms. As of today, the same is only live for AskmeBazaar sellers. These include the sellers selling in the marketplace model as well as the hyperlocal sellers associated with the brand. The company aims to build this portal as a one-stop destination for all the sellers across group companies. This would include the sellers of AskMe Grocery and AskMe Furniture.
In line with the ‘Grow With Us’ campaign, we have recently launched AskmeFin, a financing initiative by AskmePay, our merchant payment solution. AskmeFin offers anexciting portfolio of financing options to the SMEs. Itis aimed at providing a variety of working capital loans to AskmeBazaar sellers including short-term working capital loans, overdraft limit, loans against receivables and bill discounting facility for SMEs. It involves a series of strategic allianceswith a number of financial institutions to facilitate faster financing for SMEs, irrespective of the size of their business. We have tied up with Mahindra Finance, Bajaj Finserv, Religare, Capital Float, SMEBank.in and Mandii.com.
One of the interesting features about ecommerce is that it creates a level playing field for new entrants as well giving them an opportunity to compete with big brands. ‘Grow With Us’ aims to empower the Small and Medium Enterprises(SMEs) across the country, thereby helping them emerge as an important part of the growth story of the Indian economy and of the ecommerce ecosystem. In numbers, we already have got 1 lac + sellers on the platform and this number is constantly increasing. Our vision is to draw in every seller into the community and make them a part of this growth journey called ‘Grow With Us‘.
Corporate Comm India (CCI Newswire)
