India’s first and largest online marketplace, ShopClues with over 5,00,000 merchants and over 2.5crore SKUs launched a unique premium service — the Shopclues Surety Program, in order to ensure a hassle free shopping experience for its customers.
ShopClues Surety program gives assurance to customers that they are buying products that come with certain level of trust. Every product will go through scalable and cost-effective audit system and then different badges will be given to the product depending on the quality. Products will be rated on a set of quality parameters, evaluated and identified through an extensive research by the category experts.This premium service is in addition to the ShopClues Buyer Protection program which ensures an extensive 5 point quality check of the products along with the use of data analytics and secure dispatch to its customers in order to give them a seamless shopping experience. It works best for the platform’s true marketplace model, unlike inventory-led models which involve storing products in large quantities.
Talking about this initiative,Radhika Aggarwal, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, ShopClues said, “ShopClues has always differentiated its value proposition from other e-commerce competitors by offering a wide variety of unstructured portfolio of products from local and regional merchants.” She further stated, “This move is to give this large unstructured portfolio a structured approach. By accrediting products, we can provide our customers an unparalleled shopping experience.”
In order to make it user-friendly, the platform marks out the rating of the products classified into ‘Best Buy’, ‘Great Buy’, ‘Value Buy’ or ‘Brand Authorised’. This allows the customer to make an optimal purchase decision while shopping on the platform.
Nitin Kochhar, VP – Categories at ShopClues, said, “We have built a robust evaluation system which is a combination of audits (5-point checks) and technology (using data analytics) which makes it scalable and cost effective. Storing millions of products in inventory is neither scalable nor cost effective. ShopClues, being a true marketplace, believes that this is the right model for India where there are lakhs of merchants with good quality products and should have an equal chance of doing business on the platform.”
For instance, a ‘Best Buy’ product is the best rated among all the 5 parameter quality check as the quality of the product is equivalent to that of branded products. A ‘Great Buy’ product is rated good among all the 5 parameters of the quality check as the product comes with good quality combined with the best pricing. A ‘Value Buy’ product meets all the 5 parameters of the quality check as it delivers all functional benefits and is value for money. A ‘Brand Authorized’ product is 100% genuine and is sold by a brand authorized merchant.
Harneet Singh Rajpal, Marketing Head at ShopClues, spoke to Guardian 20 and he said, “We have 5 lakh merchants on our platform and we work very actively and we advocate them to participate in our program. We are just increasing the count of merchants who are on this program by thousands in a day which insures that we are selling lots of products. We target 1 million products on our platform under the Surety Program and we assume that 80% of our sales will start coming from our surety mark products in next 10 to 12 months.”
With an increased focus on customer experience, the idea of the Surety program is to guide and assure customers in their buying journey and facilitate the best in class experience.