Indian e-commerce enabler start-up GoKwik eyes global play

GoKwik, which is India’s largest e-commerce enabler start-up and is already working with over 500 D2C brands in the country, is eying a global expansion in the coming years as it sees significant business and growth opportunities in many countries.

Founded in 2020 by industry veterans Chirag Taneja, Ankush Talwar and Vivek Bajpai, GoKwik helps solve problems that ecommerce brands typically face during the shopping experience, including enhancing customer experience, abandoned cart recovery, increasing conversions, boosting gross merchandise value (GMV) and reducing instances of return to origin (RTO).

"We truly believe that there is a global ecommerce Saas opportunity for us and we would want to take this out of India," says Chirag Taneja, Founder & CEO, Gokwik.

"There are similar problems faced by many companies in both, developed and developing countries. Latin America, GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), Indonesia and some parts of Europe and the US have similar kind of opportunities. That's one of the areas that we are looking for growth," he adds.

The Gurugram-based start-up is further betting big on embedded comnerce wherein a consumer can shop whole reading through articles related to specific products.

"E-commerce is evolving a lot with commerce moving closer to content. For example, a consumer might be reading an article and would be able to shop within the article. It is called embedded commerce and that is where the world is headed. We would want to play a significant role in it," says Taneja who has earlier worked with The Bombay Shaving Company.

The former investment banker firmly believes that ecommerce has huge potential for growth in India and, more importantly, the growth will happen outside the biggies like Amazon and Flipkart.

Interestingly, that was also the trigger to launch GoKwik.

"Post COVID, I was sure that ecommerce would grow in India, and it would happen outside the big players (like Amazon and Flipkart) as well. But consumers would want a similar experience and we could provide that to the consumers," says Taneja.

Meanwhile, the start-up expects to onboard over 10,000 digital-first brands and ecommerce players on its platform by the end of the current year - a huge jump from around 500 brands that are currently part of the platform, which also boasts of more than 80 million shoppers in its network.

By its own analysis, it has helped brands reduce RTO by 30 per cent and improve conversion rates by over 35 per cent. Incidentally, RTO happens due to a failed delivery of goods and directly impacts the revenues and profits of a brand.  

Late last year, the platform had announced that it had successfully processed over $1 billion worth of orders in its network and registered a 520 per cent increase in number of transactions on an annual basis.

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