Shiprocket expands services to boost revenue beyond shipping

Ecommerce enablement startup Shiprocket, which hit $3 billion in gross merchandise value in 2023-24, is targeting revenue from additional services for online sellers such as marketing, sourcing, payments and lending, said its chief product officer Praful Poddar.

Currently, a major portion of its revenue comes from shipping services, which it provides to direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands selling online. Poddar said sellers spend 10-15% on average shipping but 30-40% on marketing and promotions, and 20-25% on sourcing.

The company has 100,000 monthly active sellers on its platform, primarily across categories such as beauty and personal care, fashion and apparel and electronics. The move could see the Zomato-backed company accessing other aspects of the seller value chain to increase its revenue.

“Shipping is always going to be our mothership. We’ve established a strong product-market fit in shipping… and even today there’s a lot of information asymmetry and opaqueness, which needs to be solved,” Poddar said.

Under its shipping offerings, Shiprocket aggregates service providers such as India Post, Delhivery and Ecom Express for D2C brands to send their products to consumers.

“We look at this financially. If you think of spending that an SMB (small and medium-sized business) or a business does, 10-15% of that goes into shipping, and there’s a certain take rate for us there,” Poddar said. “Another big area of spending for businesses is marketing, which is 30-40% of the entire pie, and there’s a take rate of 5-10% there. That is an area where we want to double down on… purely in a financial sense, there’s a big opportunity.”

The company recently launched a tool for sellers and smaller brands to deploy influencer marketing. To augment its marketing offerings, the company is also learnt to be looking for potential acquisitions.

“The second large spend is sourcing, or COGS (cost of goods sold), which is 20-25%. In both marketing and sourcing, we are very early and are figuring out a way into it,” Poddar said.

For 2022-23, Shiprocket reported operating revenue of Rs 1,089 crore, nearly 78% up from the previous year. It is aiming to reach the $1 billion revenue mark (around Rs 8,300 crore at current exchange rates) by 2028.

The Gurgaon-based company is expected to soon raise $75-100 million from investors led by Silicon Valley-based Tribe Capital, in a mix of primary and secondary funding, at a flat valuation of $1.25 billion.

In addition to marketing and sourcing, Shiprocket is building a payments and lending stack for its sellers. Currently, it offers revenue-based financing of up to Rs 5 crore in partnership with non-banking financial companies.

“Right now, we’re operating more as a distribution layer. In the future, we want it to be powered more through our intelligence,” Poddar said. “Capital is a strategic area for us. How deep we want to go into owning the value chain is something we have to decide. We definitely want to leverage the data, seller connect and the cash-on-delivery money flowing through our pipeline.”

He also said that the company, which mainly offers business-to-business services, has built a consumer-facing app for customers to track their online purchases across platforms and marketplaces.