How Simsim is building online buying experience for New Age India? | #IndiaStartupStories Ep. 1
How are social commerce apps being built in India?
Welcome to #IndiaStartupStories! For quite long my good friend (at least I think so) — Ankit Kumar Singh has been telling me to articulate my thoughts on what I read/observe, after delaying a lot, I’m starting to write this series where I do a snapshot of new-age apps being built in Indian Startup Ecosystem! I write these after using apps for few hours, using almost all the features available & maybe doing some transactions/ordering too!
PS — I’m not a startup expert, this series is just articulation of observations I had while using these apps.
Simsim
Let’s start with some details about this startup:
🤔 — Social Commerce Startup: e-commerce company enabling community opinion leaders (influencers) to sell products to thousands of micro-communities in India.
🌐 — July 2019
👨💻 — Amit Bagaria, Kunal Suri, and Saurabh Vashishtha
💸 — $16 million in funding in three rounds
📈 — 1M+ app installs on Play Store
Login Experience
- Login through Mobile No., FB or even skip Login (I liked that).
- Select Video Language: Currently they offer videos in Hindi, Bengali & Tamil.
- Constant push to make people change app language to Hindi throughout the pages, this makes sense as 70% of its customers are coming from outside of the top 10 cities in India.
Main Screen
- 40–45% of the screen is covered by search + categories + offers. Making it only a single product to be seen on the 1st screen.
- You’d expect to see videos of Expert you Follow on the main screen, rather they put it in the Menu bar. This can be because they’re not promoting Experts right now/not good quality of Experts on the platform yet.
- Also, an interesting feature is showing ‘Recently Viewed’ videos. I was able to see at least 20–25 of my last viewed videos in this section, pretty cool!
- All different sections like ‘Men’s fashion’, ‘Electronics’ etc. get loaded on the 1st screen itself with no distinction among each other. Took me a couple of minutes to realize it’s not a bug, usually apps open a separate page for this.
Video buying experience
- Looks like you’ve seen this before? :P. Yes, it is similar to TikTok video screen with horizontal left/right options rather than vertical up/down.
- Typical Video Length: 1–3 minutes
- The share option is only available for WhatsApp.
- No comments section (yet)
- An interesting thing I found while scrolling through this was people from all sorts of backgrounds are selling products — some hired professionals to make videos, some asked friends to shoot in mobile, some made videos in studios (probably by Simsim team) & some just clicked their own selfie video.
- Constant highlighting of Discounts + Easy Returns (+ Free Shipping) on every step of the user journey.
Few other observations
- Payments surprisingly have options of only PayTm or COD (No UPI, GPay, etc).
- The search feature is really bad, I searched for ‘Jeans’ & ‘Flip Flop’ which it seemed wasn’t available, but still, there was no clear message explaining it isn’t available. Also, Video results were the same for both searches.
- Experts or ‘Community Opinion Leaders’ (COLs)profile also seems okayish, it can include multiple features of making experts their own stars which I believe would be added once more Experts join.
- The app is pretty clean in terms of UX, does what it meant to do without having too many buttons or features to promote the content.
- As Amit Bagaria, Co-founder (SimSim) says, “Trust is a big factor why most of the Indians are not buying things online”. Having experts sell you products builds a good trust & also removes the huge barrier of English product description (most of the e-commerce site has this) which many people are not comfortable reading, these descriptions are now explained by Experts during the video.
- As per TechCrunch, Simsim now has more than 1200 influencers, all of them get a commission for each item they sell. Simsim handles the inventories itself & partners with other logistics players to deliver products.
- I assumed there’d be mostly non-branded products but to my surprise, there were multiple branded products too like JBL, Philips, Beardo, etc. This could be because people in smaller towns trust big brands much higher.
- It’s just a 7-month-old startup, the feat they’ve achieved is unbelievable. Social Commerce is an emerging industry with multiple players in different startup stages already working towards it. Given the market size, it doesn’t seem to be ‘one player take it all’, let’s see how it evolves!
That’s it for this Ep 1 of #IndiaStartupStories. Do let me know your thoughts if you’ve used the app. Feel free to share any feedback to me on Twitter
