SaleBhai completes a year; steps up business strategy to drive stellar growth, market expansion

SaleBhai.com, the one-of-a-kind e-commerce venture that enables people living away from home to order a range of authentic specialties directly from their hometowns, unique to that place and also discover regional specialties from across India, today announced that it has successfully completed its one-year journey since inception.

The online marketplace operates at a healthy average margin of 27 percent, attracts over 80,000 visitors per month, with over 50 percent through organic search and direct traffic. Currently, the company has over 10,000 customers on board and it adds over 1,200 customers every month.

"We are immensely excited in achieving this feat in such a short period of time. SaleBhai is inspired by people's desires to fall back on their fondest memories, aspirations, and roots. The marketplace owes its genesis to the market gap created by people migrating within India and abroad and goods representing their culture being mostly in short supply or, at times, completely unavailable," said Co-Founder SaleBhai, Vishwavijay Singh.

"We cater to the requirements of over 17 diaspora communities living in big Indian cities as well as those living abroad with products sourced from 100 Indian cities and around 300 select vendors," added Vishwavijay Singh.

"We are targeting to clock in over 1,00,000 customers and 1,000 unique sellers on our platform by December 2017. The idea is to have multiple different products available on the platform rather than having many sellers of one product. We will also focus on increasing repeat buying, increasing sales through web personalization and marketing automation and break into Alexa 1,000 range (Internet ranking for India) within the next two months," he said.

"We are looking to operationally reach breakeven by October 2016 and as we have the first-mover advantage in this space, we are committed to establish our leadership position in the market. Many of our early customers were so happy with our brand's USPs that they have now turned into investors in SaleBhai.com," he added.

Apart from the 12 happy high net worth customers who invested in the company, SaleBhai.com received seed capital from promoters and an investment of Rs. 10 crore for a minority stake, from Times Group's Brand Capital in July this year. The funds will be used for business growth and expansion.

SaleBhai's initial challenges remained akin to several other e-commerce websites in India - securing third party logistics partners, getting sellers to understand their profit margins as well as bring about a behavioral change in customers to sustain top-of-the-mind recall. The company addressed all of these challenges with pomp and fair. This is testified by the fact that, SaleBhai.com sold 10 tonne mangoes, that too in the first summer itself.