Wooplr: A social platform to give your entrepreneurial skills a boost

Sign up, create a portfolio, start selling products and earn a dignified living

Sell over 50,000 unique products and earn money from your phone”, reads the homepage of Wooplr – a platform for social sellers. They call themselves the first and largest platform making e-commerce reach the remotest corner of India especially people residing in tier-II and tier-III cities . What do they do? It is a site where one can just sign up, create their store, choose from over 50,000 products, build their own catalogue of products to sell, and earn money from each sold item.

What started as a content platform four years back, turned into a personalised e-commerce space with the aim to provide entrepreneurial opportunities to anyone who wanted to earn a living the right way. “Due to the penetration of cost-effective smartphones and free internet in the last one and a half years, a huge market has opened up,” says Arjun Zacharia, co-founder and CEO, Wooplr. “We knew there was this market especially in the tier-II and tier-III cities where people could not trust online shopping as much as their tier-I counterparts. We decided to tap into this space and empower people living in these spaces by means of selling on our platform,” says Zacharia. 

While the main target for Wooplr is the typical stay-at-home woman or , who has either taken a sabbatical from work or has never been able to work due to family pressures, Zacharia says they haven’t restricted the space to women alone. “We believe if someone wants to make a life by earning in the right way then we should be able to give them a platform,” he adds. So, from an engineering student who managed to pull off expenses to apply for patents for his products by selling on Wooplr; to a 20-year-old girl from Darjeeling who managed to fund her Masters education again by being a seller on the platform – there is a story in each person who has been a part of Wooplr. “In recent months I have met a lot of women who became sellers on our platform. For them, the site has opened avenues to earn not just a living but dignity and respect in the household,” Zacharia says. 

No wonder Wooplr has been able to empower more than 30,000 sellers across the country on their platform. Of these, 21,000 are women—over 70 per cent of the women sellers are outside of metro cities. Take the example of Alka Kulkarni, who is a teacher in Nasik. For her, the platform has been the means to earn some extra income to support her family. Priyanka Giri and her husband has been able to sell watches and shoes on the platform. Both her husband and she are using the income earned from Wooplr to save up for their daughter’s income. A monthly income for sellers on Wooplr ranges from Rs 5,000 to Rs 20,000 or more depending on the sales they carry out. 

According to National Family Health Survey, only 31 per cent women in the age group 15-49 are working. Wooplr aims to provide an opportunity for such women to become financially independent. Without going too much into the monetary aspect of turnover, Zacharia says, they have a decent growth of 25 per cent month on month, and are targeting a $50million turnover by end of March 2019. Zacharia seems unperturbed by the online space becoming more competent with most e-commerce sites going local. “Google was able to translate a page into any local language even before Amazon and Flipkart came into being. We too provide our services in 20 different languages already. I don’t think we have anything to worry about,” he concludes.