Short video app Chingari enters social commerce, eyes $100 mn revenue

Ties up with Amazon, to bring on board Flipkart, Myntra soon

Expanding its slew of offerings, homegrown short video app Chingari has entered the social video commerce platform and is eyeing a revenue of $100 million annually in the next two years from the service. The company has tied up with Amazon India for this feature and will be bringing on board Flipkart and Myntra by the next quarter. It is also in talks with several direct-to-consumer brands for a tie-up by the next quarter.

The company had been working on this ‘shoppable video’ feature for the past three months with a technology team of four people working over 10 hours everyday to make it possible, said Sumit Ghosh, co-founder and CEO, Chingari, touted as the made in India alternative to TikTok which shot to fame when the Chinese app was banned last year. Chingari recently crossed 50 million downloads and claims to have 20 million monthly active users.

Every video that will be uploaded on the Chingari platform will be parsed frame by frame and there will be object detection and pattern matching algorithms which will detect all the objects within each frame. Each object within these frames will be pattern matched with a live catalogue on the ecommerce website making videos shopping enabled in real-time by the time it hits a consumer’s feed. 

 

“When we gained popularity last year after the TikTok ban, we were just being called clone/copycat and no one thought we could build anything innovative, we are proud to launch this feature and become the first short video app globally to make short videos shoppable via AI/ML,” said Ghosh on Twitter.

There will be a shop button on the top of the display page to enable this feature, which is currently available for Android phone users. The iOS version will be live in the next 2-3 weeks.

“Other short video platforms are monetising their platforms through advertisements. But ads give bad user experience. We were always looking for innovative ways to monetise the platform and this is one of them,” said Ghosh.

Whenever a product is sold on the ecommerce website via discovery that happens on the Chingari app, the startup will get 5-10 per cent of the revenue generated. Of this, the company will give 30 per cent share to the creator of the video. 

The company is also working on a feature called Chingari Skills, creating a marketplace for people on which they can upload a set of videos of the products or skills they want to monetise while connecting them with buyers.