It all started with Jockey underwear. Then the goats started bleating. And finally Nivea got into its lotion act... welcome to Dukaan, an online retail platform
Subhash Choudhary, Co-founder and CTO, Dukaan (L) with Suumit Shah, Founder and CEO, Dukaan (R)
On one of the lockdown mornings last April, Suumit Shah got a WhatsApp message from an anonymous number. ‘It was weird,” recalls the serial entrepreneur. The sender happened to be one of the local retail store owners from Indiranagar, Bengaluru, who was desperately trying to sell Jockey underwear in a PDF format. “Here's the list of items we are selling. Please have a look at the PDF and let me know which one you want to buy,” read the message.
Shah was baffled. What was weird was not that the shopkeeper knew the innerwear brand used by Shah, but the fact that the poor chap was using a primitive method to sell his products. “Why doesn’t he have an ecommerce store?” wondered Shah, who started his professional innings with online realty firm Housing as digital marketing manager in 2014. Over the next few years, he went on to work for TinyOwl, and founded two startups—RiseMetric, a digital marketing agency, and Rankz, a content marketing platform.
The Jockey message opened up a can of unanswered questions for Shah, and all revolved around the shopkeeper. How would he be keeping track of all orders? What if an order comes from outside Bengaluru? “WhatsApp doesn’t give any service for geo targeting kind of feature,” he wondered. The curiosity made him explore the pain points of the small businesses. And then came the idea: Ek simple solution banate hain (Let’s make as simple solution). The plan was to enable offline merchants come online, and the product was Dukaan, which Shah rolled out last June along with Subhash Choudhary.
The co-founders wanted to keep the on-boarding process as simple as possible. The shopkeepers needed to sign up on the app, they would get a OTP (one-time password), then they could write the name of their business and start adding all products. Every seller would get a unique link where they would be able to display whatever they are selling. “Even a person with zero tech background could do it,” he recalls.