Srikanth
Excess2sell, India’s biggest online marketplace that helps the large Indian b2b sector liquidate its unsold, ageing inventory, is focusing on promoting the newly added verticals which include apparels, electric goods, home appliances, LED lightings, accessories and other luxury items.
The company has a reach that covers over 200,000 b2b businesses with a registered seller buyer base of over 24,000 players and transacts 10,000 roughly deals across 11 verticals in more than 340 product categories, says Mr Rajan Sharma, Founder and CEO, excess2sell in an exclusive interview with Techiexpert
Brief introduction about startup and what is that one problem it solves
Excess2sell is India’s biggest online marketplace that helps the large Indian b2b sector liquidate its unsold, ageing inventory. The company has a reach that covers over 200,000 b2b businesses with a registered seller buyer base of over 24,000 players and transacts 10,000 roughly deals across 11 verticals in more than 340 product categories.
Founders journey behind this idea.
Excess2Sell is co-founded by Mr Anant Chaturvedi, Director; Navinder Chauhan, Director and I as its CEO. All three of us previously in our professional careers were in leadership positions at GIGABYTE, DIGISOL, DIGILITE, D-LINK and iREVO which were traditional product companies.
Prior to founding the company, in our last professional stints sometime at the end of year 2015 we faced a force majeure situation with our product inventory at the distribution points which affected an entire location. The ageing inventory of stockists led to blocked capital and a slow turnaround time for sales. This got us thinking and we began to explore ways and means to overcome this situation across channels. Excess2Sell was conceived as a solution to overcome this problem faced by the large Indian b2b player base.
How did you start working on this idea?
We started exploring ways and means to overcome the above mentioned situation across channels and excess2sell was conceived as a solution to overcome this problem faced by the large sector base of our Indian b2b players. So in 2016, we launched excess2sell.com with the aim to provide solutions to vendors, distributors, and wholesalers for managing their ageing inventories; and in helping them unblock the paid capital of the supply chain.
What’s unique selling point
The idea behind the formation of excess2sell was mainly to turn this large unorganized and fragmented segment to a one stop platform for vendors, manufacturers, dealers, wholesalers and for offering their unsold – overstock, excess, ageing inventory to buyers across various verticals. One of the biggest advantages which excess2Sell.com offers to both sellers and buyers is that they can transact Confidentially, Anonymously and Neutrally.
Early days struggle.
Our domain expertise and experience helped us tide over the struggles in the early days. This knowledge helped us understand that in b2b ecommerce, a firm foundation and organic growth matters the most. At the time we started operations, taxation was a complicated aspect and we had to build our platform logic by taking various tax structures across States and UTs.
We knew GST was on horizon and it was just a matter of time before it came into effect which would allow seamless movement of goods in the future. Our traction growth was relatively slow, but our business terms were stringent. We always insisted on advance payments from buyers, never maintained any inventory nor a warehouse, and all three of us made tremendous efforts at delving into our vast network of buyers and sellers to convince them to come onboard.
Gradually the business began gaining traction and we ensured building our credibility for the long term. Other challenge was to keep a young team of developers, designers, support executives and the admin motivated and gung-ho about the vision to build a great platform for resolving the excess inventory problem. These struggles and hardships have helped us evolve into the organization we are today.
Funding received (if any)
We are fortunate to have received support from angel investors as well as family and friends who helped us raise around Rs.2 crores till date. Our sales revenues have scaled up to an all-time high of Rs.100 crores plus as of today. Now for our next growth phase we are looking to raise around US$1million – US$2million.
User base you have achieved till now.
Within a short span of three years, excess2sell has been recognized as India’s leading premier B2B platform and the company has a registered seller-buyer base of over 24,000 players.
New areas for Exploring
We are a growing business and are looking to expand. We are continuously refining our processes to make the enterprise more and more efficient. Our growth will also correspond to the number of new verticals that we plan to add to include a bigger products range. Our vision is to take this platform cross-border especially to the Middle East, SE Asia, North and South Africa, where distribution and channel structures are similar to India.
Road Map ahead
Excess2sell is presently consolidating its buyer and seller ecosystem across the country and is poised to grow even more rapidly in the coming year. Apart from the established product categories on the platform, the company is focusing on promoting the newly added verticals which include apparels, electric goods, home appliances, LED lightings, accessories and other luxury items.
The company is investing in building its Human Resources infrastructure to meet the growth challenge. This includes creating talent pools in various cities across the country with focus on bringing on board the best technology talent. The company has chalked out a clear roadmap clear in terms of new features; supply chain integration and real-time buyer and seller connect, among others. Excess2sell is confident of clocking US $50 million sales revenue in FY20 to maintain its leadership position as the first choice for unsold, overstock, excess inventory liquidation.
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