Here’s how Meesho’s seller base grew a whopping 700% in a year

Every Meeshoite has always lived and worked by the company’s “User First” mantra. We frequently take user feedback, uncover insights and incorporate them into our journey to grow in all respects. And when we say all Meeshoites, we mean ALL of them. Yes, especially our CEO and CXOs.

Recently, our Strat team — all 11 of them — went on a transformational journey to different Tier 2 & 3 towns across our country to walk into the stores and lives of our small and large sellers who have grown their online business with Meesho. Awed and humbled by the journeys of these sellers, our leaders are leaving with inspiration as well as rich insights from the ground and sharing with their teams. Here’s what they had to say about the sellers they met.

During his visit to Panipat, Vidit Aatrey, our CEO, met Bhupinder Singh, who runs a business manufacturing and selling T-shirts. He said working a job just wasn’t his thing, and so he has “so much pent-up energy, so much ambition.”

Most of the sellers are creating jobs for their communities, and being Meesho’s true evangelists in our mission to ‘democratise e-commerce for Bharat’. Meanwhile, Nikita Dawda, Chief of Staff to our CEO, met Mr Khandelwal, one of our top sellers in Jaipur.

He says, “Mai maths aur accounts toh nahin pada hu, ma’am, but dhandha karna jaanta hu.”

His business acumen was unparalleled, and he understood all e-commerce nuances including running ads, managing inventory, and competitive pricing.

Some of the sellers they met were sharp, young entrepreneurs with really high ambitions. Isn’t this a large part of our country? Inherently innovative and street smart businessmen — who hustle and do everything to become more and more successful. Our team thrives to fuel this ambition which sits in the heart of our nation.

One such example of young ambitious sellers was Divyanjali Mishra, whom our leader, Sourabh Pandey, met in Delhi. All of 18 years of age, Divyanjali is generating employment for women around her and does almost 10 crore+ of annual GMV on Meesho.

One thing is evident. Meesho has become the platform of choice for online selling. In fact, Meesho has crossed 6 lakh seller registrations on the platform, recording a 7X increase since April 2021. Our number of listings has increased 5X as well with over 50 million listings now. In our recent Maha Indian Savings Sale in June, we had multiple interventions to bring these benefits to the most local sellers on the platform. We also saw the highest seller participation during a sale season on the platform this time around. So, here’s the big question…

How on earth did Meesho achieve this?!

We made sure that all the steps we took had a deep 360-degree focus on ease of usage for sellers to do business with us. We invested and created systems for the success of every new seller on the platform from the early phase itself.

Trust challenges

We launched industry-first initiatives to create a level playing field for small and medium businesses to operate online. The first one, the “7-Day Payments’’ feature ensures sellers are paid faster, which in turn, helps them reinvest money back into their business. We understand that being capital efficient is crucial to their continued growth and success. The other feature i.e. the “Zero Penalty” ensures sellers are not penalised for self or auto cancellation of orders. Meesho was the first to begin eliminating seller penalties and with the removal of penalties around cancellations, Meesho has become the first “Zero Penalty” platform for sellers in India.

Zero per cent Commission

Business owners face quite a few challenges while moving from offline to online. We want sellers to experience the ease that comes with doing business online. As a platform with value as a core proposition, we enable sellers to price their products more competitively in comparison to other platforms with the 0% commission policy while ensuring that seller profitability remains our core focus.

Higher Mobile focus

We launched our integrated, lightweight e-commerce mobile platform for buyers and sellers this February. We took this step because:

• Our seller portal’s experience, which was only accessible through a web browser earlier, wasn’t optimised for mobile. Navigating through the website was time-consuming
• Most of our sellers didn’t have access to laptops or desktops
• Most sellers have budget smartphones with limited storage capacity. So, two separate apps for buyers and sellers weren’t ideal
• Almost 60% of Meesho sellers also had the pre-integrated buyer mobile app

Order processing, payment tracking, inventory management and seller support all became available on the integrated mobile platform. It lessened the adoption time for already existent sellers who had the pre-integrated buyer mobile app, with almost 50% of active sellers having tried it at least once. It also simplified a seller’s registration journey, increasing the number of registrations and conversion rate of registration by almost 50% from Feb 2022 to now.

Targeting Potential Sellers

As part of building the seller brand, we have undertaken a holistic approach to drive awareness and consideration in the community. In 2022, we have launched two 360-degree communication campaigns that are centred around a deep understanding of triggers and barriers for MSMEs. We started with the “India Bhar Mein Chha Jaao” campaign in February and our latest campaign “Sahi Sahi Customer Toh Business Ek Number” in June.

We highlighted that we consistently attempt to understand our sellers’ core barriers and a part of that included the launch of two industry-first features i.e., “Zero Penalty” and “7-Day Payments”.

In the second leg of the current campaign, we will drive focused communication and awareness building for these features among sellers. The new campaign showcases the opportunity that Meesho offers to the sellers. This includes access to 11 crore+ value and quality-seeking customers, and the key benefit of 0% commission.

In addition, we have recently also kick-started the “Meesho Tarakki Express” — our on-ground market activation initiative with a primary objective to drive higher consideration for e-commerce with a deeply engaging Virtual Reality (VR) experience. The “Meesho Tarakki Express” will extensively cover the markets on-ground across the entire span of Bharat over the course of the year.

Personalised Seller Training

Working with and scaling small sellers can be an uphill climb initially since they are so new to the platform. Many of our users fell into one of two categories i.e. either first-time online sellers or already online sellers who found the Meesho platform different from other marketplaces. This created was a strong need for seller education. We offer 2 ways of seller learning:

1. Assisted learning — A teacher/student setup of sorts with interactive webinars or one-on-one training. Webinars are typically hour-long sessions which are designed to be fully immersive classroom programs. One-on-one training is typically a 5–10 min phone calls intended to serve sellers who are too busy to attend the hour-long webinar, but prefer assisted learning mode
2. Self-learning — Sellers who prefer learning alone can choose to learn about the platform through our YouTube Channel Sell on Meesho, or go to Meesho Supplier Learning Hub on our seller website.

We also understood that there were distinct seller preferences which pushes us to optimise our platform features to provide an engaging experience for our sellers. We personalise our training content and formats to increase relevance such as creating short informative lessons on specific topics for those sellers that prefer them.

Since sellers come from all over Bharat, we introduced aspects such as creating training material in Hindi and English and adding a local flavour to make the training material more relatable and applicable. We plan to add more Indian languages soon. Currently, we have over 50k subscribers who actively engage with our content. We have observed that sellers who attend training perform better in the initial 45-day journey and the retention rate is higher among sellers who attend training.

Initial boost for new sellers

New sellers need a little handholding and encouragement when they start their journey on the Meesho platform. The platform boosts new sellers and new catalogues of sellers through its robust discovery mechanism. Additionally, we provide free ad credits worth INR 1200/- to all new suppliers who achieve 7 live catalogues milestones within the first 2 weeks of their journey. This enables them to create ad campaigns in the early days to get more visibility for their catalogues. We noticed that the sellers who ran campaigns using ad credits were much more successful in the first 45 days of their journey, thus much more motivated to continue leveraging our platform for their business.

Credits:

• Written by Siddharth Mukund (LinkedIn)
• Edited by Sheeba Mammen (LinkedIn, Twitter)
• Designed and illustrated by Shoumita Dhar (LinkedIn, Dribble)
• Special thanks to Kriti Jain, Shalaka Yadav, Mohit Manaktala, Jagrit Kumar