TheRodinhoods

WooPlaza: To help online retailing grow in India

Hi everyone,

This is my first post in the forum. Writing in to get validation on a few thoughts. I’m starting a project, WooPlaza, that aims to help small sellers with no background in technology start selling online.

[Note: As I logged in to post this, the first discussion I saw was Gurudutt Nadiger’s heartfelt post on the travails of an online seller. I completely empathise with it, and it vindicates some of my guesses below. But the concept below is targeted more at potential online sellers who are a lot less tech savvy than most of us on this forum]

Context:

Some guesses:

Planned solution: This has three parts.

SaaS based online stores. Not very different from Shopify or Zepo, but a lot simpler, and free below a certain volume of sales. Mainly to get entry level sellers comfortable with the idea of selling online. Limited set of technical features to keep things easy.

Ideally, posting a product to sell should be as easy as composing and sending an email.Simplify further over time by:

An online forum for sellers to help each other out. Add the following over time:

A mobile app where products of all sellers get automatically listed. Customers searching for products should get accurate results, unbiased by ads or premium listing fees.

The initial concept is available at https://www.wooplaza.com. Would love the community’s feedback on this.

It would be great if you could ask potential online sellers to fill out this survey: WooPlaza Survey (Google Forms)

I’m not necessarily looking at converting this into the next-big-money-making-idea. In fact, I don’t believe this model is likely to be highly profitable. The goal is to help as many non-technical sellers get online as possible. Any other ideas from the community on how to achieve this would be welcome too.

Regards,
Hari

Twitter: @wooplaza