E-comm and payments enabler Instamojo ventures into social commerce

Instamojo, which allows merchants and businesses to sell products through the web and accept digital payments, is now venturing into the world of social commerce through the reseller model. Currently, in beta launch, the latest feature will allow its million-plus merchants to sell products of other Instamojo sellers through social media platforms and earn a commission.

The move appears apparent for the company as it had recently acquired GetMeAShop — a company that enables MSMEs to create and operate online stores and offer third party infrastructures such as logistics, CRM and mobile apps.

Like Meesho, Shop101, GlowRoad and other social commerce platforms, a reseller on Instamojo can generate payments link by confirming the product he/she wants to resell and share it on WhatsApp, Facebook, SMS and email for the end consumer. 

At present, the reseller feature focuses on non-fashion categories such as education and travel packages. It may add other categories in the future.

Since Instamojo has over a million sellers on its platform, the company wants to tap them first before acquiring resellers out of its ecosystem. The seven-year-old firm has very deep penetration amongst small sellers. The long term trust can be handy for the company to convert existing merchants base into resellers.

It’s worth noting that Instamojo is the first B2B e-commerce enabler to enable a social commerce feature for its users. Companies such as KartRocket and BuildaBazaar are yet to come up with such offerings.

Of late, social commerce has been a buzz word amongst consumer-facing companies. Paytm had entered the segment recently while ShareChat also acquired Elanic to explore monetisation opportunities through social commerce.

Entrackr had exclusively reported about the foray of ShareChat and Paytm in social commerce.

While Naspers-backed Meesho has emerged as a leader in the overall social commerce space, a clutch of new startups including BulBul, SimSim and EkAnek have been using video and vernacular languages to penetrate tier II, III and IV cities.

Given that Instamojo’s seller base largely consists of small merchants, a large chunk of existing merchants wouldn’t mind becoming a reseller for some extra bucks. The feature also makes GetMeAShop’s offerings more attractive for small sellers as it comes up with a reseller integration as well.