E-commerce unicorn Meesho crosses 1 million registered sellers

Bengaluru-based Meesho has crossed the 1 million-seller mark on its platform — a feat it has achieved in eight years (and two years since it pivoted to a pureplay e-commerce model). More than 80 per cent of its 1.1 million registered sellers are ‘new-to-ecommerce’ and selling online for the first time. Of the total seller base, more than 600,000 small businesses signed up in the last one year, Meesho said in a statement.

Nearly 50 per cent of Meesho sellers hail from Tier 2+ regions, including remote corners like Pulwama in Kashmir, Una in Himachal Pradesh, Nagamangala in Karnataka, Jowai in Meghalaya and Mount Abu in Rajasthan, and so on. Meesho’s zero-commision policies allowed small-town sellers to list their entire assortment on the e-commerce platform without the fear of listing fees. The SoftBank-backed company claims that sellers on its platform saved Rs 3,700 crore in commissions last year, which helped them grow their earnings and reinvest it back in business. Additionally, Meesho sellers also clocked a 3X growth in their average revenues.

Utkrishta Kumar, CXO, Business at Meesho, shared, “Driven by our industry-first initiatives such as zero commission, an increasing number of MSMEs have chosen to partner with us. Meesho doesn’t segregate sellers on the basis of tiers, nor does it have private labels or an inventory-led play. Our democratic approach is evident from the fact that we have the lowest GMV concentration by suppliers in the industry.”

In 2022, Meesho had a transacting user base of 140 million. The platform clocked 910 million orders, growing by 135 per cent over the year before. It currently has ~100 million active product listings across 30 categories, with womenswear accounting for highest sales.

In an earlier interaction with Business Today, Sarthak Misra, Investment Director at SoftBank Vision Fund (which invested $300 million in 2021), said, “Indian e-commerce 1.0 had succeeded in bringing organized retail online—smartphones, TVs, fridges—but those were just one set of spends. If you looked at spends like offline apparel at Rs 500-Rs 600 price points, they were not coming online. Meesho was going after an unorganized retail market and bringing it online.”

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