Next time you hunt for a product and find the lowest cost product on an e-commerce website like Amazon, Flipkart or Paytm, don’t forget to also check your local merchant, who may offer the same product to you at a lower price and much faster delivery. All this can be done online on Jugnoo’s conversational platform -- AskLocal -- which has been piloted in 36 cities.
What Jugnoo does is that it lowers the logistics cost by basically connecting the merchants and end-customers directly and allowing customers to pay for transportation service separately. Jugnoo’s investors include Snowleopard and Paytm.
AskLocal is a conversational platform, such as Quora, Facebook and Twitter, and also allows for hyper-local commerce channel, Saurabh Wadhawan, Chief Product Officer, Jugnoo, told BusinessLine, adding that this was profitable at a transactional level, since the service was offered on Jugnoo’s delivery platform.
This is how it works. People can put a query to Jugnoo and put a link of the lowest cost product that they have discovered on Jugnoo’s chat-bot. The person sitting on the other end will then put that demand on to sellers. At present, several e-commerce websites provide differential pricing based on the time of delivery.
Jugnoo expects a larger part of its three million user base to start using these services, particularly since it will reflect the product and transportation cost price separately. So, people have the option to pay for a product by UPI or e-wallet or online banking or debit or credit cards to merchants, and pay by any mode including cash to the person who delivers.
“We are seeing about 3-5 per cent of transactions happening on UPI, with a bit of failure rate, particularly in tier 2 cities, such as Gurgaon, Noida and Chandigarh,” Wadhawan said. The company also allows its registered users to post anonymous queries. You don’t have to reveal the demand if you don’t want to.
AskLocal is opening up its platform slowly and is adding anything between 200-500 users, and is also seeing a waitlist that gets cleared in about two days, he added.
Jugnoo has three million users, most of which are active and have downloaded the app in 36 cities, of which 15,000 are drivers, and remaining over 5,000 are merchants.
On the pattern of payments, Wadhawan said on the Jugnoo platform, 40 per cent of total transactions were through e-wallets, which shot up to 60-65 per cent during two months of demonetisation and have now come down to 50-55 per cent of total transactions, effectively showing an increase, said Wadhawan.