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XOBOX aims to tackle residential last-mile delivery hurdles

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
XOBOX aims to tackle residential last-mile delivery hurdles
Medial

Last-mile delivery hasn’t been perfect. Not that the likes of Dunzos of this world haven’t tried to address this. Recently, we saw Zomato experimenting with last-mile delivery through a unique concept of ‘walkers’ for corporate parks. Bengaluru-based XOBOX is one of the few startups that is trying to fix the last-mile delivery challenges especially for people living in urban areas. The company handles packages for residents in apartment complexes. Some of the features are securing the packages in smart lockers and dropping them to customers’ doorstep when they are back to their homes, and home delivery of essential items. We spoke to XOBOX founder and CEO Kiran Shivappa about his startup, what distinguishes it from the competition and the roadmap ahead. Here are the edited excerpts: How did you come up with this idea? I live in an apartment complex and even before the Covid deliveries were left scattered in front of the door and stray cats use to destroy especially milk packet which cause everyone to talk about it hours in community Whatsapp group, this made me think to find/adopt a solution to secure the deliveries when residents not able to receive it or may be they are not around. How does the platform work? Please help simplify the process. When we started the service, we started taking the request from residents to handle their packages and we coordinated with delivery guys to take the package, pay them if it is a COD [Cash on Delivery], and secure them in the locker until they come back, then we deliver it to their doorstep. We went one step ahead and made a contract with 3PL [Third-party logistics] and ecommerce companies to take every delivery coming to the society and our dedicated resources would hand them over to the residents, if the resident is not available then secure the package in the locker and hand it over once they come back. What are the key challenges in the industry that have not been addressed yet? And how do you plan to address them? Ecommerce companies have tried many solutions to optimize the last leg of the delivery process and achieved the Kirana model also, but they never got a chance to be inside the society exclusively and take care of the deliveries and achieve the customer delight to bring the most convenience to them in their package receiving time. We have dedicated resources inside each society to carefully handle the package and interact with residents and elderly people and become familiar to them so they feel comfortable to receive us at the doorstep at any time and feel secured as well. Industry major players tried to introduce the lockers but these lockers operate as a complete unmanned and fully automated, for this reason the adaptation was a big challenge and education was also a challenge. We adopted a 70/30 model where, way the lockers were built, operated and how people would feel easy to adopt this because the “30” percentage is the resources we introduced along with “70” percentage technology, our dedicated resource will work with all stake holders in the gated community to educate and make every one understand how to use the service. What are your short-term and long term goals in terms of product and business expansion and diversification? In the short term, we are looking to expand the service to 35 more gated communities in Bengaluru in 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2024 and then go to other cities. As far as long-term plans go, we are going to sign contracts with major ecommerce and 3PL companies to increase the volume in each society and serve the needs of elderly population in the community. We would want to reach 700-1000 gated communities and generate 150-180 cr annually.

Return Prime aims to make return management seamless for brands

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
Return Prime aims to make return management seamless for brands
Medial

Bengaluru-based Return Prime provides a customer return platform which includes a business dashboard for managing returns. The company aims to make it easier for brands, specially smaller ones, to use its services through a plug-and-play model. Beyond basic returns, brands can use the Return Prime platform for automating return logistics, refunds, replacements, and more. We spoke to founder and CEO Shashwat Swaroop to learn more about Return Prime, what distinguishes it from the competition and the roadmap ahead. Here are the edited excerpts: How did you come up with this idea? I have always been extremely passionate about creating something and solving problems, building my brand which helped other people solve their challenges was always something that I intended to do. Once an eCommerce brand came to me with their return management nightmare. They were doing everything manually and it was too cumbersome. It was not only time-consuming but was impacting their customer experience too. Customers were used to a certain speed, standards, and experience, and to ensure their shoppers wouldn’t leave them, they needed a solution to cater to this. But building a whole software program was just out of reach – both financially and in terms of time! I then began researching, and my study confirmed what I suspected – there was a massive gap in the market for managing returns. Existing solutions were few and far between, and mostly focused on the US. We saw a chance to empower brands worldwide to make return management extremely seamless, one that ensures their GMV losses are minimized while customer experience is maximized, that’s what led to the birth of Return Prime. Please help understand how you generate revenues. The pricing models are quite fair and simple. This was one of the most important things for us to simplify. When we started building Return Prime, we were simplifying the complicated experience of returns for both brands and their customers so keeping everything around Return Prime simple was important. The pricing model is just based on the scale of business which is how many returns they do in a given month. One can start with the Free Forever plan if they are a small brand and pay nothing forever. They only have to choose a paid plan when they start to grow. As you grow, you can choose one of our Grow plans which starts at $9.99 a month. What are the key challenges in the industry that have not been addressed yet? And how do you plan to address this? We are working to solve the way businesses see returns. The correct solution is not to focus on reducing the returns but on figuring out how you can turn your returns into a revenue-making opportunity. Returns are simply inevitable so the merit is not in reducing it by another few per cent but in converting the majority of it into additional revenue. We are constantly working on it and on average, our brands see an ROI of 183%+ with Return Prime, which is on the cost they pay for Return Prime every month. This is going up constantly with our focused effort to turn returns into revenue. How has your startup performed since its inception? Please share statistics. We have been growing from day 1, completely bootstrapped. We grew 150% YoY in the last 3 years and this is not just India, across the globe. We serve merchants in 100+ countries today and our market share across these countries continues to increase every year. In the last 3 years, we have processed over 12 million returns for brands and customers globally. What are your short-term and long-term goals in terms of product and business expansion and diversification? From a product expansion point of view, we are focused on increasing the ROI for our brands as we believe in keeping strong fundamentals. While we do this, we will continue to increase our market share across other regions as well along with India. As consumer behaviour evolves, we are also trying to help brands offer Omnichannel returns experiences to their customers making it super easy and delightful for them. This not only helps the customer but also increases the repeat purchase and LTV for brands as this customer will trust them even more. On the other hand, we are also trying to help bigger brands solve more complex operational problems and policies which now with Return Prime is just a matter of click. We will continue to simplify complexities as we grow along with brands. In terms of geographical expansion, we will go deeper into some of the regions and increase our market share while we continue to turn returns into revenue for the rest of the world.

Here is how Skydo addressing challenges in B2B cross-border payments

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
Here is how Skydo addressing challenges in B2B cross-border payments
Medial

Bengaluru-based fintech firm Skydo aspires to make cross-border B2B payments much more hassle-free and address common challenges such as steep forex charges. Founded in 2022 by former Ola executives Movin Jain and Srivatsan Sridhar, the company aims to tap into the massive market of cross-border payments, which is dominated by global players like PayPal and Stripe. We spoke to cofounder and CEO Sridhar to learn more about Skydo, how it works, and what is the roadmap ahead. Here are the edited excerpts: How did you come up with the idea of Skydo? My co-founder Movin Jain and I used to work together at Ola. This was about six years back and we’ve been good friends since then. I’ve been mostly doing business roles throughout my career. First year at McKinsey, then for several years in startups and in between for about six years I ran my family-owned business. Movin has been an engineering and product guy and most recently before we started up he was actually at Phonepe, leading the payments platform. So given I have been a manufacturing exporter myself, somehow you know making life simple for exports, figuring out the problems that exporters have in terms of the complicated foreign exchange and other things that they have to deal with has been on my mind. But I never kind of thought about it consciously until we started brainstorming about which space we have to build in. Given Movin’s recent stint in payments, he was very excited about payments and the value of technology in improving payments. So since we were brainstorming about payments, some of my experiences studying the payments and wanting to solve for them came to our thinking and then we kind of started deeply digging into whether these problems are real, how can we solve them as a small company, what kind of actual issues do exporters face on a ground level, let’s talk to a few people and understand. And as we did the initial research, we realized that this is actually a real problem and it’s worth solving and this is a large enough market for us to solve it in. So this was largely the genesis of Skydo. What are the key challenges in payments and exports, cross-border payments that have not been addressed yet and how do you plan to address this? Up until 20-30 years ago, inter-entity payments were slow and cumbersome, often involving manual processes like cheque writing. International wire transfers were particularly sluggish and document-heavy. However, the likes of PayPal, business and international payments have transitioned to facilitate online transactions globally. Conventional banking systems have also significantly improved their infrastructure, with the inclusion of faster payment systems within domestic countries. This robust infrastructure, coupled with various payment options, enables companies like us with the right tools to address unsolved customer challenges. Moreover, consumers now expect instant payments, regardless of geography. Though things like compliance pose another hurdle, with varying regulations across countries causing confusion and complexity. Simplifying and standardizing compliance procedures can enable seamless international payments and business transactions. While companies like Skydo are lowering costs, there still remains room to tackle margins through technological solutions. While issues like Forex hedging and treasury management exist, addressing these concerns should be the next frontier in the payment landscape. Can you take us through how Skydo has performed since inception. So we started the company exactly two years back in March of 2022. It took us about seven months to launch the product after our first set of partnerships and approvals came. We launched in November 2022 with a small pilot batch and since January of 2023, we have been gradually and systematically scaling the business. Today, we have onboarded close to 2,500 businesses and currently our rate of acquiring new businesses is almost 500 to 600 businesses every month. So, this number is doubled, the customer base is doubled at the end of March from what it was at the end of December 2023. And I think at this pace of growth, it looks like it is going to sustain for quite a bit of time now. From onboarding, then if I look at the total payments processed, we are currently processing about $50 million of payments. This again is growing quite strongly and I think by the end of next year, that is the March of 2025, we hope to be processing over $750 million of payments annually. That is the kind of scale that we are looking at. What are your goals in terms of product and business expansion? So in the short term, obviously we want to really scale and hold a very large market share for Indian small businesses. I think that will keep us busy for the next couple of years at least. Although we will also follow this with multiple product features that will be required to make this happen from creating more countries where we can have local collections, enabling credit card payments, enabling two-way payments both from India to outward and along with the export payments that today exist and so on. So there’s an entire product roadmap that will support this growth in India. We also have to be looking for multiple licenses throughout the world. We have already applied and are waiting for approval for the payment aggregator license that RBI gives for cross-border companies. But in addition, we will be looking for multiple licensing in other geographies that will allow us to slowly and steadily expand to more corridors beyond India, which is slightly on the longer term plan. Apart from payments, the diversification is primarily into software to start with. Over time, when we have a very large scale, we might diversify into commerce as well as working capital. But that is very long term.

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