Mother Daughter Duo Shipping Happiness From India To The World
Opportunity India Desk
May 16, 2022 -
7 min read
Online Shopping, the process of buying goods through the internet, is an easy and convenient thing we all do. From groceries to apparel, food items to tools almost everything is available online nowadays. Online shopping is so convenient that it has become a part of our daily routine. People are using online methods for shopping so much that calling it an addiction would not be a false statement.
The Indian E-Commerce market is projected to reach USD 188 billion from USD 46.2 billion during the period of 2020 to 2025. By 2030, it is expected to become a USD 350 billion market. In 2022, the e-commerce market of India is expected to grow at the rate of 21.5 percent, reaching USD 74.8 billion.
“A big chunk of growth for this industry has been catalysed by internet and Smartphone penetration. The number of internet connections in 2021 increased to 830 million, driven by the ‘Digital India’ programme. Out of the total internet connections, 55 Percent of connections were in urban areas, of which 97 Per cent connections were wireless” as stated on The India Brands and Equity Foundation’s website.
Talking about Global statistics, Stastita, a global market research firm stated that, “In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 50 percent over the next four years, reaching about 7.4 trillion dollars by 2025.”
Online shopping or E-Commerce has changed the way business is being done in India. Businesses are also taking part in this ecommerce revolution by registering themselves on ecommerce websites and selling their products online. InIndia, this process is quite simple until the businesses are working across states but things change as soon the business wants to sell products to customers in another country. Businesses need a lot of certification and paperwork to get the right to sell the product worldwide. It is not always the businesses who suffer, a big number of people are left out from using the authentic products available exclusively in India.
A start-up from Hyderabad, India, solved this problem by enabling people living worldwide to shop from anywhere and get the product delivered to their doorstep. As mentioned on their website, “yourDesiCart is your shopping friend from India that facilitates shopping from India and shipping worldwide. It can facilitate shopping from online sites, local stores, vendors, and package pickups. Either you can shop yourself and ship items to yourDesiCart India Locker or use yourDesiCart Personal Shoppers to shop on your behalf from India.”
The brand was also nominated for Small Business Awards 2022, Hyderabad organised by Franchise India. Below is an exclusive interview with Founder of the Brand yourDesiCart, Satya Ayyagari.
Q. How does it feel to achieve/be nominated for the small business award?
A. It is a great feeling to have been recognized. This recognition has given a face-lift to yourDesiCart.
Q. When did your business begin?
A. We registered yourDesiCart in Aug 2020.
Q. Why did you decide to start your own business?
A. It all started with a need. All my life, I have been pampered by my mother and mother-in-law with authentic Indian goods supplied directly from India to abroad. When I was five months pregnant with my daughter, my mom was unwell and my mother in law had to undergo surgery. At that time,I needed many items from India like baby jubbas, monkey caps, postnatal health supplements, cradle ceremony, mom-daughter-father coordinated ethnic outfits, sweets and much more. Sadly, there was no one to shop on my behalf, or who could receive my parcels for my online orders and then consolidate, store, pack and ship it to me in the United States of America. I could not bother my mom due to her illness. I searched for similar alternatives in the USA and I found very few of them; that too were too pricey. That was the first time I felt how hard it is to wash and purchase anything from India if you don't have anyone in India to shop and ship for you.
That is when the idea popped up and I reached out to my mom in India to see if she was interested in sending consolidated shipments to our friends and relatives from India to abroad. Within 1-hour of broadcasting the details, we received our first order from California, USA!
Q. What was your first objective when you founded your business?
A. Objective was to enable international shopping from India as seamless as domestic shopping. Make it affordable such that items can be bought from India to worldwide for the cost they are sold in domestic markets in India.
Q. How many people work for your company?
A. There are 16 people working for us.
Q. What products or services do you offer?
A. Following are our services:
Concisely, customers just need to ask us anything and we can get that done for them from India. We consolidate items received from all the above and pack and ship them to people Worldwide.
Q. What methods do you use to promote your business?
A. Facebook groups, paid ads on Google, Facebook andInstagram are some of the options that we use to promote our business.
Q. How difficult was the start, what was the motivation and what was the reason for starting the business?
A. Six months from starting the business were extremely challenging. We were dependent on third party courier services, so we had to offer expensive rates to end customers, a number of them used to read about our company and ping us on WhatsApp, but our rates were not competitive to market rates, so several of them went back. Even tracking of packages was extremely bad and chaotic due to lack of first hand information. We could not automate our systems either.
Then in Jan 2021, we got Business Partnership Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn, a German Logistic company, and that was the turning point to make or break the system.
Q. Please tell us what is the current industry trend of your sector?
A. Indian goods are sold at premium prices out of India.
Q. If you were not a businessman. What else would you have been?
A. Besides being a businessperson, I am a mother, hiker, camper, and a technologist.
Q. How do you handle your competitors in the market?
A. Everyone gets his or her share of the market!
Q. How was the initial seed fund taken care of?
A. Our business is Bootstrapped and that too without any initial funding.
What Small Businesses Can Learn From It
“Necessity is the mother of all inventions”. Charles Darwin, a Naturalist from nineteenth century, proposed a chair with wheels so that he could get the objects quickly and later the whole world adopted it. Similarly, Satya Ayyagiri, when stuck in the US with her need for products from India, she started yourDesiCart so that no Satya ever faces such a situation. Somewhere, her problem made her create yourDesiCart to help users from across the globe to relish the authentic products from India.
Most of the business, including yourDesiCart, tells that a business can only succeed if it thinks the way customers think. It gives a clear picture to how businesses grow, only if they are a problem solver and think to serve customers prior to themselves.
