Unicommerce

Unicommerce is India’s largest e-commerce focused supply-chain SaaS technology platform, that processes over 20% of India’s e-commerce volumes. The platform acts as an aggregator for sellers to manage orders and inventory across multiple marketplaces, website platforms, and offline stores. The platform offers e-commerce enablement software for multi-channel sales, warehouse management, D2C operations, and omnichannel solutions.

The company has a huge clientele of over 10,000 registered customers across India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, with the platform used to manage over 1500 stores, 6000+ warehouses, and is used to process 800k+ order items per day, amounting to USD 4$ Bn+ GMV annually. Some of our key clientele includes Bestseller (Vero Moda, Jack & Jones), Forever New, TCNS (W, Aurelia), House of Anita Dongre, Marico, Udaan, Netmeds, Myntra, MCaffeine, Sugar Cosmetics, Mama Earth, Zivame among many others.

I am Kapil Makhija and I joined Unicommerce in 2015 and have been leading the organization as the CEO since 2017. I work with team leads and division heads to spearhead the company operations, product development, business development, and maintain client relations. I am responsible for ensuring consistent company growth along with maintaining a strong P&L. I also work with the board to carve the strategic growth plan for India and international markets.

As e-commerce gained traction in India, it was becoming next to impossible for e-commerce players to manage their business operations manually or with traditional software which were not designed to manage the complexities of e-commerce operations. Keeping this thought in mind, Unicommerce was launched in 2012, to act as a middleware solution that helps e-tailers and e-commerce companies in managing all e-commerce supply-chain operations on a single platform. We were the pioneers of building indigenous inventory management, order management, and warehouse management solutions designed specifically to meet the e-commerce needs of e-tailers across India. This helped us become the most trusted and largest e-commerce supply-chain SaaS solution provider in the country.

Our solutions are designed to address the supply-chain operations challenges faced by e-tailers. We have built a robust SaaS product that allows e-tailers to manage all e-commerce operations on a single platform. We believe that a dynamic industry such as e-commerce needs an integrated solution that evolves with the changing environment.

We ensure that we are able to simplify e-commerce selling from the beginning of their e-commerce journey. Unicommerce is recognized in the industry for its fast onboarding process. Our average onboarding time for a new client is just 2 weeks, while other solutions take 6-8 weeks to deploy.

While building our solution we ensured that it’s easy to integrate and organizations can continue with their current working practices. The training of the workforce becomes easier, which is one of the key benefits of our solution. Another key factor is that our solution is easily scalable. It is often observed that companies start a pilot project for e-commerce and gradually scale up their operations, our solution allows them to grow easily and we become an integral part of their growth journey. This also allows them to automate other aspects of their operations with Unicommerce solutions.

An effective and quick after sale-service plays a pivotal role in the success of any software solution company.  We have a well-trained customer support team that works in close association with our clients and helps them in every part of the business. We have been able to increase average customer value by 100%.  An average e-tailer would find it difficult to manage multiple marketplaces manually, therefore they end up restricting their operations to 1-2 marketplaces and they need one dedicated person to manage orders from each channel. Post deploying Unicommerce solutions, sellers are able to scale their operations to 7-8 sale channels which often includes marketplaces and brand websites. Some of our clients have reported 8-10X growth in a period of 4-5 quarters, and are able to process around 100 orders in less than 10 minutes, while earlier it used to take 4-5 hours of manual labor.

Any company that is planning to establish its online presence and is looking for technology solutions to automate supply-chain operation and improve business productivity can benefit from Unicommerce solutions. The continuous feedback and regular product upgrades have helped us build a sector-agnostic product.

Every sector has its unique problems, for instance, fashion brands have multiple SKUs with different sizes and colors, FMCG and personal care companies need a solution with expiry management, a B2B business needs a bulk order management solution. Therefore we made our product agile and it can easily be adjusted based on the business requirements of e-tailers.

We work with some of the leading e-tailers and marketplaces and take regular feedback to ensure that we are addressing all the concerns. We are the market leaders and work with leading brands across segments.  In the fashion segment, we have brands like Jack and Jones, Myntra, Adidas, Vero Moda, W, AND, Global Desi, and many more, in Personal care we have companies such as Sugar Cosmetics, Mama Earth, and Plum to name a few, in FMCG and health care we work with Marico, Emami, Healthkart, Netmeds, Agrostar amongst others leading brands. Unicommerce works with 10,000+ registered customers located across the country.

Unicommerce is an undisputed industry leader in the eCommerce focussed SaaS solution market. Our platform processes 20% of India’s e-commerce volumes. Some of the key factors that make Unicommerce, India’s largest e-commerce supply-chain SaaS technology platform are:
 

The largest number of integrations: We believe in providing a unified platform that allows sellers to work with ease and improves business efficiency. The Unicommerce platform is also seamlessly integrated with more than 150 partners across marketplaces, logistics providers, and ERP systems, making it a plug-and-play solution for online sellers. A few of the key platform partners of Unicommerce are Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Shopify, Magento, Delhivery, FedEx, Blue Dart, DTDC, SAP, Oracle, Tally, Microsoft Dynamics Navision, among many others.
 

Comprehensive return management: Return orders are an inevitable part of the e-commerce business and we have designed our solutions to help companies in managing returns effectively. Features such as the quality check module, reconciliation make us stand apart from the competition.
 

E-commerce focused Extensive Product Portfolio: We understand that each e-tailer has its unique business requirements, therefore we have a wide product portfolio for different business requirements. We are the only player in the market which offers e-commerce focused integrated order, inventory, and warehouse management along with omnichannel management. This enables the sellers to keep growing on a single platform, rather than having to work with multiple platforms.

FMCG and personal care-focused solutions: We have built a sector-agnostic platform, with a wide range of features for every industry. We have features such as batch management and expiry management, which is one of the key requirements in the FMCG and personal care category, we also offer bulk order processing for B2B companies. We are the only player in the Indian market to offer e-commerce focused solutions for the FMCG/Personal care industry, which can operate at a reasonable scale. This is why all the leading Personal care and FMCG D2C brands such as Mama Earth, MCaffeine, Sugar Cosmetics, Marico, Emami, etc. are using our platform to manage their e-commerce operations.

At Unicommerce we have a customer-first policy. The customer experience is at the core of our business, and developing a bond with our client is engraved in the DNA of the company. We work on a retainer model with our clients and we start developing a strong relationship with customers from the onboarding itself. We assign a customer relationship manager to each client from the beginning of our association and the relationship manager is responsible to ensure that clients get the full understanding of the solution. The close association with clients helps us in getting real-time consumer feedback, which allows us to evolve the product at a much faster pace and make it stable for them to continue their business operation with ease.

Unicommerce has achieved an NPS score of 75+, which is a great benchmark of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. We believe in giving maximum power to our consumers, therefore we charge our customers on a per transaction basis, making it a win-win situation for both sellers and Unicommerce.

We have been able to retain our customers and increase the average customer lifespan by over 100% in the last couple of years. Our customer life cycle increased from 2 years to 4+ years. We have a lot of customers who have been associated with us for 5+ years and it's a testimony of our great product and a good customer relationship.

Unicommerce has worked with 10000+ retailers located across the country. Over 30% of our customers are repeat customers (i.e. are upsold on other solutions). We have one of the largest pools of OMS customers (who use our solution to manage orders and inventory across 80+ integrated marketplaces) in the industry and these customers are brand evangelists, and help us grow our business at a rapid pace.

Most of our customers begin the association with one product (typically order management product) and once they start seeing the benefits and the direct impact on the bottom line, they upgrade the service to have access to more features. Lots of companies start with an order management solution and they gradually opt for other solutions such as warehouse management or omnichannel management, depending on the business requirements.

We have various types of content that we have prepared over the years to help our clients. Keeping customer experience at the epicenter of all decisions, we wanted to ensure that we offer seamless onboarding for all our clients. While we assign a customer relationship manager to personally take our clients through the onboarding process, we have also developed a series of DIY videos and articles (available at http://support.unicommerce.com/), and clients can learn by referring to these help articles/videos. Lots of our clients re-visit these videos to deep-dive into new features. We also keep adding new videos and articles, whenever there is a new feature release or functional updates, along with sending regular email updates about the new feature/ product releases.

We work closely with all our customers and offer a series of support services. We have a chat support system, which addresses all the basic queries of our clients. We have a robust database of FAQs regarding basic operational problems that our sellers may face and our chat solution is well equipped to handle these queries. We also have a customer relationship manager for our larger accounts, and our clients can connect with them in case of any concern. We also ensure that we take regular quantitative and qualitative feedback from our clients and we swiftly act upon their concerns and needs.

The company is built on strong business fundamentals. We are on a continuous growth trajectory. Unicommerce achieved USD $7mn ARR in FY 2021 with an EBITDA margin of 10-15% (we have been profitable for the last 4 years already). Our robust international expansion plans and customer-first policy will help us grow and thrive despite the economic slowdown.

Today, Unicommerce processes over 20% of India’s e-commerce volume and enjoys the leadership position as an e-commerce supply-chain solution provider of India. We continue to sustain the growth momentum and have four key focus areas of expansion.
 

Deep Rooted presence in India: Unicommerce is the pioneer in the industry and has worked with over 10000+ e-tailers across the country. As the e-commerce industry matures in India’ increasing number of e-tailers will start adopting technology solutions and we want to ensure that we can provide a best-in-class solution to them. In the last couple of years, we have seen increasing technology adoption amongst e-tailers from Tier II and Tier III cities of India, and this trend is expected to continue in the coming years.

Build International presence: We started our international operations with Dubai in 2018 and today we have clients in South East Asia, Middle-east, and South Asia. We have seen increasing demand for our products in these markets, and we are positive that we will be able to build a strong client base in these regions. We aim to increase our international business by over 300% in the next few years.

Deeper presence in emerging categories: As an increasing number of consumers start shopping online, the industry will see new categories emerging in e-commerce spaces. For Instance, FMCG and the personal care segment have reported strong growth in the last year. These segments are now becoming mainstream and people have started ordering groceries online. We have seen an increasing number of offline players in these categories going online and our solution is well-equipped to help them in their online journey. Similarly, the industry will witness more sectors becoming mainstream such as frozen foods, and ice creams, and we will ensure that our solution is well-designed to address the industry-specific challenges.
 

Continuous Product Evolution: As a supply-chain solution provider we preempt the future challenges and upgrade our solution to the evolving industry needs. We have been in the industry for over 9 years and we are recognized as a company with future-ready E-commerce SaaS solutions. There is continuous innovation in the delivery and supply-chain space, for instance, B2B e-commerce gaining momentum, brands going fully omnichannel, etc, we ensure that we adapt to the changing business environment to help brands thrive in the dynamic e-commerce environment and achieve desired growth.