OhLocal – India’s first-of-its-kind O2O (online-to-offline) local commerce marketplace platform that is connecting local merchants with consumers in their respective locations cities via its flagship Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled platform – has announced they are currently looking to scale-up operations exponentially and in parallel increase the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) on their platform in the upcoming year, i.e. 2023. Additionally, by 2023-end, OhLocal will be targeting to partner with 10,000+ sellers/merchants across India and thereby creating an over INR 90 Cr business opportunity for them. Also, at the same time, OhLocal aims to expand its tested and proven hyperlocal hybrid-commerce platform to at least 20 cities in India, while adding roughly 300-500 local merchants in each of these cities.
OhLocal is a next-gen hybrid-commerce marketplace committed to bridging these gaps between online and offline commerce in India, and providing the best of both worlds – the convenience of online shopping and the trust and feel of offline shopping. OhLocal works towards bridging the gaps between local sellers and buyers in a specific city/location by ensuring that a consumer can get prices from multiple local sellers before buying any product and can choose the best deal in terms of pricing. In fact, OhLocal, through its cutting-edge tech, is able to reverse the entire process of e-commerce which leads to better prices and more effective product discovery and availability in the local market, wherein a product is requested by a buyer. OhLocal’s unique business model and platform has created a win-win-win opportunity and optimal value creation for all stakeholders in the new-age commerce ecosystem i.e. End-Users (Customers), Brands, and Sellers.
Speaking about the platform’s growth plans, Devashish Goyal, Founder & CEO, OhLocal says, “Come 2023, and we at OhLocal are aiming to achieve aggressive growth at multiple levels – starting from growing our user base to partnered seller base and much more. Off late, a dire need has been felt to digitize local sellers and retailers in India and enable them to embrace emerging technologies in such a way that they are able to play on their strengths. And we at OhLocal are committed to doing just that. In the coming year, while aiming a 10x growth in our partnered merchant volume, we at OhLocal shall simultaneously strive to achieve at least 17X spike in terms of business generation for them. Besides growing significantly on the consumer and partnered seller side, we will also look to expand to new geographies soon and would be introducing new product categories such as furniture, fashion, mattresses, among others, with our flagship hybrid-commerce platform.
As of date, the OhLocal platform has onboarded around 800+ local sellers across 5 cities in India – including various types of sellers – from small retailers and shop owners to medium and large sellers and so on, who have already received an overall business opportunity of INR 5.4 Cr from OhLocal. And in the process, OhLocal has also helped these sellers on to save significant amounts in commissions, which they would otherwise need to pay to large e-commerce giants in order to enlist and sell their products online. Notably, the average commission fees charged by most big ecommerce websites or platforms tend to be 8-10%, whereas on OhLocal, getting on boarded onto their platform is a simple and free-of-cost procedure for all types of local sellers/merchants.
Notably, till date, OhLocal has acquired around 10k users; and going forward, they are looking to strategically grow the platform’s user base to at least 5 lakhs by end of 2023. Whereas from a geographical expansion standpoint, by 2023-end, OhLocal — which is currently present in Meerut, Noida, Gurugram, and Ghaziabad – plans to be soon venturing into Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra, Gwalior, Jaipur, Udaipur, among other cities.