We will expand globally in 2016: Neeraj Jain, Zopper CEO
We will expand globally in 2016: Neeraj Jain, Zopper CEO

Zopper is a hyper-local mobile marketplace enabling users to discover and buy products from their nearest retail stores sitting in the comfort of their home or office. Zopper’s mobile app provides users a place to buy electronics and appliances from local stores (hyper-local marketplace) in 20 cities.

Zopper is aiming to reach a 100-city goal in 2016 and will consider expanding globally. Recently, the company also went live on price comparison websites and listed its platform with portals like FindYogi, Mysmartprice and mypricedeals. Under the move, products listed on Zopper will now be available for viewing on price comparison platforms whenever a user searches for a product. Moreover, all the offers, discounts and other benefits listed on Zopper’s platform from the local retailers will also be featured as a part of the integration. Retailer media caught with Neeraj Jain, CEO, Zopper and discussed the homegrown marketplace’s plans for 2016.

Zopper started off as a price comparison website, but now is a platform for purchasing products from offline stores, what triggered this change? Why didn’t you go for rebranding early on?
The online price comparison is a small market as majority of shopping happens online. With the growth of mobile users, it became viable to build a business model around offline stores. So, basically the change in macro environment (mobile growth) and small size of online price comparison market made us move to this.

It is widely known that Zopper, after rearranging and remodelling their business became more popular and successful, was it a preconceived phase transition or did it happen due to limited growth in price-comparison model?
We were growing very fast in price comparison business also but we realised that we won’t be able to grow beyond a point as overall market size is pretty small.  So, it was a deliberate transition to include offline price comparison and eventually, hyperlocal marketplace model.

What all challenges did you face in the first phase of your launch?
Actually, we didn’t face any major challenges as for us, it was not really a pivot (discarding previous business and starting a new one) but for us, it was like evolution. We first addded more sellers (offline in addition to online sellers) and then we added layers of payments and logistics to turn it into hyperlocal markerplace.

What was the revenue model when Zopper was just a review site?
We used to earn through qualified lead generation (CPC, CPS); content syndication: review syndication and various other types of content syndication for various eCommerce portals and brand webstores, and branding activities/recommendation services/listing, display and so on.

How have you innovated and improved your market share today?
We are the only hyperlocal company which is catering to electronics and larger appliances market. We are certainly the largest hyperlocal ecommerce company in this space and in terms of GMV across various hyperlocal verticals. We did it on the basis of lots of innovation. We are building a very unique model of product and services which has made us completely differentiated from rest of the players.

How many merchants have listed on the app until now?
We have over 15,000 (plus) merchants listed on the app until now.

Do you think you rebranded just at the right time?
Absolutely! We were well known at that time but users had different expectations. Rebranding was done exactly at the time when were evolving into a marketplace. The users who came to Zopper had the right expectations and were able to relate better with the name.

Share with us your learning’s you’ve gained post rechristening.
What we learned is that one should have a short, catchy and preferably without any meaning name. If there is a strong association of brand name with anything specific (like Reviews42 was strongly linked to Reviews) it restricts company’s ability to add new services.

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