Shutters down on Snapdeal's yet another acquisition

Gurgaon-based online marketplace Snapdeal pulled the shutter down on yet another of its acquisition Shopo, the company's customer to customer marketplace just a year and a half after acquiring it. Snapdeal had acquired Shopo in July 2015.

This is the second such portal Snapdeal closed down. Last year it shut its high-end fashion marketplace Exclusively and made it part of the main Snapdeal marketplace. The move comes at a time when Snapdeal is aggressively looking at optimising costs amid an intense battle with Flipkart and Amazon.

"We started, a year and a half ago, from a small conference room with our mission to enable small and individual sellers across India to sell online. In this short time, we have together discovered the dynamism and vibrance in the C2C space in India," Shopo said in a blogpost.

Just two days back, news of two long-time senior executives at Snapdeal putting in their papers came out. Sandeep Komaravelly, SVP of Shopo, a C2C marketplace and one of the oldest employees at the online marketplace came on board after his company Grabon was acquired by Snapdeal in 2010. The other top level executive Abhishek Kumar, head of M&A and investments quit the company after a three-year stint.

Meanwhile Shopo in the blogpost added that its team has helped more than two lakh sellers start and grow their online shops. "However, we realise that it will take some more years for a broader ecosystem to develop around the C2C segment," it said. SoftBank-backed Snapdeal said it has absorbed all Shopo employees.

The company had during the first anniversary of Shopo, announced that it had two lakh sellers on-board and over five million listings organically within a year.

"The rapid adoption of Shopo is a validation of our efforts to become the platform of choice for small, micro and home entrepreneurs. The growth in the C2C segment that we are witnessing closely follows similar C2C marketplace trajectories in global markets and we are sure to become much bigger in the coming quarters," Sandeep Komaravelly, Senior Vice President, Shopo had said then.

Snapdeal had earlier shut down Exclusively,.which it acquired in 2015 and absorbed it into the parent after it saw its sales steadily dwindling. The company in a press release last year had said that Snapdeal has completed the integration of Exclusively. Snapdeal had acquired Exclusively in 2015 for around $25 million. Sources said that while its rest of the world business was doing relatively well, its orders from India were dwindling fast.

With increased pressure of achieving at least breakeven levels, the founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal had apparently given strict instructions on performance to heads of various divisions and set tough deadlines for targets which it found it hard to reach.