StartUp Circle: How WhatsApp Integrated e-Commerce platform Bikayi is transforming MSMEs?

This is the age of social media. If you are not promoting your products on Facebook and WhatsApp you are missing out. Bikayi helps you to set up a WhatsApp integrated shop and sell products. It is an eCommerce enabler which helps in catalogue management solutions for businesses. Sonakshi Nathani and Ashutosh Singla launched the platform in 2019.  The two IIIT Hyderabad Computer science engineers (Ex Microsoft/Square) felt the need for such a solution in their family retail business and same up with the solution.

Here, Sonakshi Nathani talks about their startup and how Covid-19 enabled them to turn profitable.

1. What is Bikayi about? Tell us about the team.

Bikayi enables micro and small businesses in India to set up their online stores. It leverages the potential of Whatsapp to quickly add and share product catalogues without much technical know-how and with very low friction.

While merchants can use the platform for free till up to 500 products display and post that for branding and another offering, Bikayi offers a subscription-based model ranging from Rs 2,999 to Rs 7,999 per year. Bikayi charges a small fee to its merchants and is seeing rapid growth in adoption of paid plans as well.

2. How did you come up with the idea?

We looked at Shopify and found it totally not suitable for micro businesses especially for a mobile-first market like India and lack of WhatsApp support. Then, we quickly built the technology and application to solve their problem and quickly had over 1000 users in a month.

3. What is your business/market growth?

The App is based on a “fermium model”. The free plan enables anyone to launch a store. The premium plans start from 199 Rs onwards and have features like custom domains stories etc.  The app has garnered over 400k installs in a very short time with over 85000 active merchants on the platform and growing at 120% month on month. planning to have 1 million merchants by end of this year.

4. What is the significance of e-tailing, post-pandemic?

Ecommerce has had an inflexion point during the pandemic. Especially hyper-local eCommerce and grocery business over 90% of FMCG sales happen in Kirana stores in India. Customers are now used to a world where they want a one-click ordering experience and Bikayi perfectly fits into this paradigm.

5. The pandemic has affected every sector. How are you coping?

The pandemic has been a blessing in disguise. Our App was the perfect way for small stores and businesses to go online and compete organist organized eCommerce players. We have witnessed 120% growth in both the merchants & revenue.

We have ramped up our team and raised funding to cope with the increased demand.

6. How are you different from any moral e-commerce company like Amazon, Flipkart?

We give complete control to our merchants and sellers and do not charge any fee other than the nominal fee for our premium offering whereas amazon and Flipkart charge anywhere from 20 to 30% of revenue to small sellers.

The platforms like Amazon and flip-kart control the customer details but on Bikayi customers control their customer data and destiny and build a trusted relationship with their customers. Bikayi also helps merchants go online in a few minutes whereas Amazon and Flipkart have a customer on-boarding time in weeks.

7. What are your Post-Covid plans?

BIkayi will be the go-to place for the millions of small merchants to go online for the first time. Further, we hope to onboard 10 million stores in the next year.

Funding

Recently, we have raised a seed funding of 2Mn $ by the clutch of international investors. Mantis Ventures, Y Combinator and others