\Hopscotch: We ship over 1500 orders in a day\
\Hopscotch: We ship over 1500 orders in a day\
Aditya Dhawan, Head - Marketing and Finance, Hopscotch.in says it is not caught up in the humdrum of showing big numbers, but building a long term sustainable business. Retailer Media caught up with Aditya to talk about what makes them different, the massive curation that takes place before listing a brand on to the website and the national platform Hopscotch is for entrepreneurs around the world.
Few excerpts.
 
How is Hopscotch different from other e-tailers/marketplaces?
The baby and kids-wear segment has seen a lot of consolidation in the recent past. Infact, of the seven players originally in this segment, today, only two have survived. Other websites are search based and so shoppers come to them with an intention to buy something as opposed to those who come to our website and end up discovering merchandise even when they are not proactively looking for them. 
This is what differentiates us. We are a discovery-led platform focused on providing mums with fun, fresh and exciting merchandise every day. We curate baby and kids' products through our 'What's New' section that launches 6-10 fresh brands every day. The fresh products remain on our site for about 3-4 days and then they are gone. Our much sought after 'Bestsellers' section serves as a perpetual store front providing successful brands with increased visibility, traffic and traction. Our unique shopping experience allows for strong engagement with mums who are very loyal customers.
What is Hopscotch's value proposition? How many brands does your website feature?
We have featured around 1,500 brands on the website. A lot of these brands are exclusive to our website and mums would not find these anywhere else.
Merchandising is core to our business and we are very focused on providing a delightful discovery-led experience to our customers. Our strength lies in the fact that we never compromise on providing good quality brands to our customers; these are brands that offer safety and comfort and those which we ourselves are comfortable with.
To make this happen, we put in a huge effort towards curation of our merchandise...we don't just pick up brands and list them up on the website. We have teams in the US, Thailand, China and India, who work closely with these brands and invest in building and nurturing these relationships. And this is appreciated by our partners. For example, currently we are the only distributors of Carter's in India, one of the biggest baby brands in the world. Given our relationship and commitment, they have chosen to launch their India strategy with our online space and are only currently available with Hopscotch.
We are about building brands. We have not only supported big international brands that were seeking to launch in India have but also built successful brands for several small mompreneurs from across the world. This gives us great scale and reach…our products could be sourced from one small market in South Africa or the United States where a mompreneur may have some great merchandise to offer. For us, the ultimate objective is to provide carefully curated, good merchandise from around the world to our customers.
 
How do you see the buying behaviour changing in the near future? Talk to us about the sudden interest in mobile commerce.     
We have always seen about two-thirds of our sales coming from mobile devices and this is only going to continue to increase. India is a mobile-first country and there are more mobiles than laptops here. Fortunately, from the very start we invested and built our website to be mobile friendly, and so have never had to adapt it any further. Mobile will continue to play an important role in Indian e-commerce going forward.
Talk to us about the opportunities and challenges being in your kind of business.
I think the opportunity clearly lies in finding the plethora of entrepreneurs all over the world and giving them an engaging platform to establish their brands. In terms of challenges, for us, it's all about ensuring that our customer gets the right product experience and service every time. This is of highest value to us as a brand.
Did you have a problem in rooting Hopscotch in the market at the time of inception?
We started in October of 2012 and were a discovery-led platform right from day one. Providing a unique platform that differentiated us from existing players was our focus and we have been able to achieve this by maintaining some of our beliefs through these years. Identifying the unmet need of Indian moms seeking unique, quality merchandise at affordable prices for their children, we set up operation with the aim to make unmatched variety accessible to mothers around the country. And this is what makes us successful.
You will never be into selling consumables such as Diapers?
It has never been part of our strategic plan. Since the very beginning, we have been about discovery. We are focused on building a business for a long term and not growing by simply providing discounted consumable products that can be found at any neighborhood store. To build a long term sustainable business, we want our shoppers to continually come back toour website and discover the freshness of our products. Our aim is to delight our customers with our service and the unique, quality merchandise that we source from around the world.
Tell us the number of products you are able to sell in a day?
We ship over 1,500 orders daily, and each of them would have about 3-4 items in it.
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