Wishbook’s online B2B marketplace revolutionizes traditional textile businesses with digital catalogs and simplifies retailer’s routine purchase, across India.
Globally cloud solutions have become a prerequisite for managing routine business tasks efficiently. It is estimated that Indian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to invest a whopping Rs. 1,00,000 crore into cloud applications this year. Interestingly, adoption of cloud computing has doubled in 2018 from 2016, reveals a research. Besides, government’s initiative to consolidate GST process have intensified the trend of embracing cloud systems by Indian SMEs.
Tapping the trend Wishbook Infoservices Pvt Ltd, introduced a B2B cloud platform that connects manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers dealing in apparel category. Aiming to tackle the challenges that traditional methods of businesses possess, Wishbook has executed profound changes in textile business ordering processes.
Firstly, most entities in the Indian retail sector is dominated by SMEs. They use general communication tools and standalone desktop-based applications. As a result, information required by these businesses is unavailable easily.
Answering to lack of information issue, Founder of Wishbook Arvind Saraf says, “Our Mobile App works in 2-ways. It allows sellers to be updated via live reports of their existing channels, the status of their catalogs and orders. And, retailers get facility to place and track their orders right from online payment to their doorstep delivery.”
Secondly, textile wholesalers and manufacturers lack effective marketing and sales through heavy printed catalogs. Responding to this pain-point, Wishbook eliminated the costs of printing and logistics drastically by presenting an online platform that allow manufacturers and wholesalers to share their fast moving catalogs digitally to multiple groups, to be discovered by new wholesale buyers or retailers, transact with them and manage their existing sales force and channels.
Further, the SaaS application assists garment store owner to be updated with new designs and fashion trends coming in women’s ethnic wear and place routine purchase orders in a jiffy from 500+ catalogs and non-catalogs available at unmatched wholesale rates. This include sarees, kurtis, Indo-western outfits, lehengas, salwar suits, gowns and dress materials.
Finally, Wishbook has organised all the business processes assimilating catalogs, ordering, accounts, GST invoice generation, streamlining operations as well as managing logistics for the textile traders.
This way hundreds of textile merchants have upturned their businesses from Wishbook App across India, earning a substantial revenue hike.
About the Founder
Arvind Saraf is a Computer engineer (trained at IIT Kanpur, MIT & Google) turned entrepreneur. Before founding Wishbook, Arvind co-founded a Ratan Tata backed healthcare social venture – Swasth India. He also took a traditional saree brand online profitably.
Outperforming the Competition
The company has strong technical know-how, expertise at the founding level and DNA of exploring new technology and use of data is core to their existence. They constantly look at technical upgrades, performance efficiency, and improve their user experience. Use of recommendation engines, machine learning, and core learning algorithms is already in practice for a certain future aspects of their product, and for more targeted outreach to the merchants.
They have combined out technical expertise with years of experience in textile sector, allowing Wishbook to map out the traditional processes online in a seamless way. In the initial pilot women’s ethnic wear target category, they have the top brands, the widest range of catalog, the best wholesale prices and discounts.
Wishbook’s proprietary credit risk assessment algorithm learns from the traditional market merchant risk assessment. This allows retailers to get a credit line they can exercise on the wider pool of merchant, allowing manufacturers to sell to new merchants without the credit risk, and enabling banking partners’ access to an untapped credit market.
Dedicated and Skilled Workforce
Wishbook’s dynamic team combines a mix of experience and young startup energy:
- Engineering and Product team is responsible for product feature definition and implementation.
- Seller support handles the seller lifecycle. From initiating sellers onboarding and training to ensuring a sure success on Wishbook. They are responsible to display top brands with competitive wholesale rates.
- BDMs and field sales executives are responsible to get retailers as well as sellers registered on Wishbook.
- Marketing team creates engaging content for more than 1 lakh merchant base, and is responsible for mass outreach to the retailers, bringing them onto Wishbook.
- Buyer engagement team converts the merchants into engaged and transacting users.
- Operations team ensures that the buyers get seamless shopping experience and orders.
- Accounts team makes sure that all the financial priorities are fulfilled.
- HR team assists the above teams and brings in human resource for streamlining Wishbook’s routine management functions.
Exceptional Client Services
The company has revamped the textile businesses from a traditional bringing it on digital platform. Due to digital catalog, the cost of printing manual catalogs, carrying it, and sending it via the courier is eliminated. The retailer gets to choose from 60,000+ designs, 200+ brands of ethnic women wear, either in sarees, lehengas, salwar suits, and a lot more. Sellers too get to reach many more merchants and buyers from pan-India, driving their business from local to national level.
Many home-makers and work-from-home members engaged in the business of selling apparels on popular social media platforms, are using Wishbook to complete their orders. Retailers have found Wishbook pricing much more competitive than the rates they could negotiate directly with various manufacturers. Many retailers have used Wishbook credit partnership to expand their business from multiple suppliers, and become a semi-wholesaler.
Towards the Future
The company states that the future of cloud computing is bright and they’re seeing the transformation happening in and around the world in a tremendous speed. Businesses are eliminating the desktop-based software and welcoming the cloud-based software.
Apart from the discovery and marketplace, Wishbook aims to digitize the existing communication channel, manage field sales force, and integrate with various accounting softwares. They are working on various B2C e-commerce integrations to make the company as the single point of catalog management.
