Chat Commerce in India

You know things have changed when your laundry guy sends you a message on WhatsApp asking, “Bhaiya, aaj kapda hai kya?” (do you have any clothes to give me today). Large numbers of people like that who never used SMS are now comfortably sharing messages, pictures and videos over chat. The preference order of communication is fast reversing to ‘Chat first, Call later’.

India happens to be the largest markets using chat platforms like WhatsApp and Hike for personal communication. Businesses are adapting to using messaging platforms to communicate new product arrivals and offers. A distributor in Lucknow now sends pictures of the latest arrivals to all his retailers to solicit orders through group messaging.

Google was the entry point for new users on the web, whereas messaging through chat apps is that for most Indians on the mobile.

Chat lends itself nicely for B2C communication as it helps in maintaining a written record, is conversational, allows for asynchronous and unstructured conversations and is less intrusive than a call. All these reasons and more served as a motivation behind launching Goodbox, a B2C product on the chat platform.

Goodbox enables Commerce-on-Chat. It’s a commerce-enabled messenger between consumers and businesses.

Goodbox for businesses

For businesses, Goodbox helps businesses to connect with their customers directly over chat while allowing extensions (menu & online payments) to complete the transactions at the same place.

All the businesses want an app presence. They find it difficult to compete with tech startups that create aggregator platforms. Even if businesses do create their own apps, consumers don’t prefer downloading multiple apps for multiple things — hence businesses find it difficult to get downloads for their app.

Goodbox gives offline businesses an app presence in 5 minutes — making these businesses more agile, technologically competent and consumer centric.

Enabling millions of businesses to be app-commerce ready is what Goodbox is does.

As a specialized B2C chat platform, unlike other peer-to-peer chat apps, Goodbox enables inventory API integration, payments, language support and a host of business-specific features.

Businesses are adopting Goodbox rather than building their own mobile apps, since apps are expensive to build and even more expensive to promote and maintain.

Our journey so far

We enabled payments in July 2015. We have 2000+ businesses (and growing), 50K+ users, and have raised about $2.5 million in our Series A from Nexus Venture Partners.

You can browse what the media says about us here.

We have been able to bring together a wide range of businesses from neighbourhood stores across supermarkets, chemists, laundries, restaurants, canteens, bakers to fashion retailers, bus operators and government services on the App. We currently have 2000+ businesses on the app and over 50,000 registered users, who are conducting daily commerce over chat in India.

We’ve taken baby steps towards building a fair and transparent mobile-first commerce on chat platform in India. It seems like India is ready for it and it won’t be long before chat commerce becomes the norm. Do try out Goodbox App or recommend it to a business you know!