Yappily: Meet India's first online flea market

Yappily has confidently seized the space with over 1,200 unique sellers, reports Tech in Asia

Online flea market app Yappily lets a buyer and seller interact and transact in 10 seconds literally. Over 17,000 users are doing that already.

It has co-founders in management graduate Kamonasish Aayush Mazumdar and technology graduates Rohit Kumar and Rashmi Ranjan Padhy. Their Bangalore-based startup helped in the discovery and curation of products which are otherwise difficult to find, provide a platform for new as well as pre-loved products, build a social network of “good” people, and make it work both offline and online.

Yappily has confidently seized the space with over 1,200 unique sellers – both online and offline – and more than 500,000 products on board.

Amazon versus emotions

The founders like to call it ‘India’s first social aided ecommerce startup’ – a concept they say is staring at a $100 billion market in five years in India alone. 

An online flea market showcases non-mass produced products. The buyers and sellers of Yappily thus seem to value the ‘difference’ more than the ‘sameness’ of just another ecommerce portal.

For their offline flea markets, they either charge a fixed price for every stall or a percentage of the actual sales at a stall – so that side of the business is actually profitable. Online, they don’t monetise yet. The average transaction value on the app is around $7.

The things people unearth on Yappily range from clothes to accessories to home décor to artisanal and handcrafted products. 

Given that there is virtually no one operating in this space in India yet, Yappily is happily planning to expand to cities like Delhi and Mumbai, as well as towns, in the next three to six months.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here