 "MyGate")
MyGate, which provides software for community management and gate pass access for gated communities, has ventured into omni commerce through MyGate Exclusives.
Over the coming two quarters, the company plans to address other community-specific gaps that exist in the broader commerce landscape, such as group buying for communities and a resident-to-resident marketplace.
“MyGate as a platform can enable communities to harness their collective power to get a price advantage from brands, thereby no longer purchasing simply as individuals. We believe that there are numerous opportunities in this space for MyGate to unlock and we will be coming up with numerous initiatives through this year into commerce. To start with, we have Exclusives, through which we will curate a number of essential products and services that offer value to our users,” said Abhishek Kumar, chief operating officer and co-founder of MyGate.
MyGate serves over 15,000 societies in over 2.5 million urban homes. It got good response to Exclusives during its six-week soft launch, with a third of its daily users.
For brands as well, Kumar said, gated community residents are an attractive group with a large disposable income, and communities that are a hotspot of homogeneous consumption. Examples are pest control, grocery buying or vehicle servicing.
“We had inquiries from many brands, both small and large, over the past few months and this pull has led us to a successful pilot and the launch of commerce on MyGate today,” he added.
It currently has over 80 brands on board across categories and plans to empanel over 200 brands by March 2021. Over the longer term it plans to test things such as group buying for communities and a resident-to-resident marketplace.
While the current MyGate product is paid for by housing society managements, the new business model of Exclusives has no cost to the customer. “For brands that are on Exclusives, there will either be a listing fee, a revenue sharing agreement or a mix of both,” said Kumar.
Last June, MyGate and online real estate platform NoBroker accused each other of stealing proprietary customer data and filed first information reports (FIRs) against each other. On the issue, Kumar said the matter was still sub judice.
On the concerns about data protection, he said that MyGate complies with key tenets of the Personal Data Protection Bill in India, and is GDPR-ready (General Data Protection Regulation, the data protection law in European Union).
“For example, MyGate societies can have all personal information wiped out periodically and all users can request their data be forgotten,” said Kumar. “With regard to Exclusives, there is zero sharing of any information between us and partner brands. It is only after a user purchases a product or service that minimal information is shared with the brand for order fulfilment. Furthermore, Exclusives is completely non-intrusive and we will leave it up to the consumer to discover individual brands themselves,” he added.
During the lockdowns spurred by Covid-19 in India, MyGate grew by around 10 per cent every month since June, Kumar said.
MyGate added features such as containment zone identifier, Aarogya Setu integration, body temperature, mask and oxygen level checks, and exclusive partnerships with brands such as Grofers, ITC, Box8, Medlife, etc to make things easier for residents of housing societies who were at home.
