India Startup Ecosystem — The Inflections and Tailwinds Powering Blinkstore
Blinkstore is an E-commerce store builder vertically-integrated with Print-on-demand services in India (+ delivery). For creators/brands to launch their merch store within minutes for free!
Disclaimer: I am bullish on India Startup Ecosystem. I personally believe that India has the most versatile ecosystem filled with opportunities and hard-working people.
A lot of people in India turned to the Internet to take their businesses online in the year 2020. People were searching for “Design and sell t shirts online India”, “start online business”, “how to start a cloud kitchen at home” etc. on Google. The rise of India’s Startup ecosystem, constant headlines in the news about startups, and increase online content consumption all lead to increased awareness about building businesses and the idea of building a side income.
In this article I explore the inflection points in the Indian Startup Ecosystem, some of them are new and some have been building up for the last decade. And how they are all contributing as tailwinds to the growth of Blinkstore.
1. Web development ecosystem is strong and getting better
The consistent updates in Chrome OS and Chrome Browser have made PWAs (and TWAs) very powerful. Not yet as powerful as a native application. But today we’ve platforms like Figma, WebFlow, and new WordPress, quite powerful and phenomenal.
These platforms are capable of working on all types of devices, capable of real-time collaborations between users, transfers, and processes a variety of data, and doing computation on the browser (local device) itself.
Blinkstore is also available on PlayStore as a TWA (Trusted Web Activity), and it works fine like a native application. The ability of this platform to adapt to all types of screen sizes enables creators to launch stores, customize storefronts, design products, and publish them on the store very easily. Blinkstore users can design and launch new print-on-demand products right from their mobile phones anytime, it is as simple as creating a post on Instagram.
This was something that want’s possible till a few years ago. And with time, the web-based platforms will keep getting robust and feature-rich.
2. UPI Payments in India
According to the data released by NCPI (National Payment Corporation of India), in the calendar year 2021, UPI recorded 4.56 billion transactions, worth Rs. 8.27 Trillion.
The ease of making online payments, at zero transaction cost makes it the favorable payment method for customers and merchants. It is so easy that non-tech-savvy people of India have adopted it through super apps like PayTm and PhonePe and other more payment-focused apps like GPay (Google Pay). UPI has become the darling of payment gateways, merchants, and customers. It also feels secure, the refund for failed orders and failed payments come instantly in most cases, and simple to use applications make it easy for the users to track debits and credits.
The UPI payment tailwind makes the point-of-sale (point-of-transaction) on the online customer journey a cakewalk. On the other hand, Blinkstore again makes use of UPI to transfer the profits earned by creators on their stores. The instant settlement of profits and no minimum limit on withdrawing builds trust among sellers and encourages them to focus more on designing amazing products and making sales.
3. Customers who don’t seek cash On delivery shopping
Collecting cash on delivery is painful for E-commerce players. The cash comes back into the system late, there’s a high chance of fraud, and CoD also leads to high cancellation at the time of delivery (return-to-origin up to 30% ).
The efforts put in by Flipkart and Amazon over the last decade have resulted in a matured customer segment that is comfortable for paying online for home delivery of products. Still, Cash-On-Delivery is the king in India. A 2020 report by Economic Times said that the share of COD orders in India is 60%-65%. Amazon, Flipkart, 1MG, and many D2C brands suspended COD orders in 2020 (during lockdown) to promote no-contact delivery. But they caved in after a few months of pause on COD to bring back the demand.
The remaining 30% to 35% of customers who do not seek COD are gem India’s E-commerce. These people are at scale also influencing their family members back home in tier-2 and tier-3 to attempt a pre-paid delivery. The cancellation rate in pre-paid orders is 10% to 15%. It can be noticed that customers are getting a hold of pre-paid orders and the percentage of this segment will rise drastically in the next 3–5 years.
4. Delivery infrastructure
India’s delivery infrastructure is the lifeline of E-commerce, by the way, it is the lifeline of any E-commerce in every country.
Amazon and Flipkart’s in-house delivery services, delivery startups like Delhivery, Gati, Blue Dart, etc, and the incumbents like DHL, DTDC, and India Post have all armed up to pull off a sophisticated supply chain. India’s delivery supply chain runs on trains, trucks, mini-trucks, and motorcycles by the last mile.
On top of this robust delivery provider’s network, we've powerful tech-enabled aggregators like Shiprocket, Shyplite, and ClickPost to make the job of D2C brands easier. Blinkstore also uses a delivery service aggregator for shipping the print-on-demand products on behalf of our sellers (their stores).
5. Print-on-demand companies in India (PoD)
Print on demand is not a new concept, there were PoD companies way before the Internet was mainstream. Print-on-demand has been a part of the apparel industry. But it has never been utilized quite well, to its full potential, the way Internet companies have utilized it.
The demand and new use-cases of Print-on-demand also popped up with colleges, private sector companies, organizations, and many groups feeling the need of having their official merchandise. Most of them got their demand fulfilled through local print-on-demand shops. But at the same time, it allowed Internet companies to put print-on-demand infrastructure on the cloud and open the floodgate of demand for PoD products for various use cases.
In the USA, Teespring, Redbubble, Zazzle, and many more companies gave the power of Print-on-demand to artists and creators. It enabled them to launch their own merch stores and start selling merchandise to their fans and followers. Blinkstore is like Teespring, we call it the best Teespring India Alternative. But we are building it with a special focus on India’s user segment, keeping the SaaS platform free (features that cost $28/month on Teespring are free on Blinkstor), making it mobile-friendly, going the extra mile to keep product pricing affordable with quality, and running a closed community of our sellers to learn about their challenges first hand to later solve it with technology.
Note: Blinkstore is vertically-integrated with a host of Print-on-demand partners and delivery aggregators. As of now, 1000+ sellers are running their custom merch store using Blinkstore.
6. Content Creators in India
YouTube and Instagram are the biggest social media platforms in India by the number of users. In India B (tier-2 and tier-3), Indian startups like ShareChat (Moj and MX TakaTak, TikTok clones), Trell, and others dominate. While Twitter has ~58 million users in India.
Average Indian spend 4.4 hours on mobile phones, which shot up to 7 hours during lockdowns. If we plot it on the Gaussian curve, we’ll find out the segment that is spending 7 hours to 9 hours on mobiles phone daily. These power users, coupled with cheap Internet (thanks and Jio and pricing wars) and amazing content creators in India. We’ve 800 million Internet users, hooked to YouTube, Whatsapp, and many more mobile applications for their day-to-day activities, and entertainment. This provides the content creators in India who have an organic reach of millions a golden opportunity for monetization.
In the last two years, content creators in India have seen a huge rise in the startups in the creator economy space. Creator economy space is new in India. And creators who play the long-term game along with startups who build extremely valuable SaaS platforms for creator monetization (while operating at low burn rate, churning operational revenue) will eventually win.
The content creators in India sitting on the wealth of organic reach and engaged audience can slowly monetize it by launching their own merchandise stores with Blinkstore. And/Or starting multiple D2C brands anonymously and using their social media growth skills at work to churn out profitable businesses over time.
7. The Creator Economy platform’s up for integrations
As I mentioned in point no. 6 about growth in the creator economy platforms in India. We’ve got good startups like GoSocial (by Hapramp), Scenes, CreatorStack, TagMango, etc. that are building tools for creators to build community and monetize through various channels (digital offerings). We’ve seen this trend in the west where various creator economies, creator commerce, and social media platforms collaborated on the product level in form of integrations.
The integration between the creator economy platforms, creator commerce platforms (like Blinkstore), and social media is up for grabs in India.
I believe these inflection points and tailwinds will keep on pushing the growth of Blinkstore in India. And help us reach our mission of enabling at least 1 million independent creator-led businesses in India.
