I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Chandan Maruthi and Pooran Prasad, founder and CTO of Storrz.com respectively, one of India’s leading and up-and-running social shopping sites. Storrz has been in business since last quarter 2007 and has done very well by signing up more than 100 merchants and some pretty well known names among them and doing a decent revenue rate per month on sales. When I visited Storrz a few months back, it looked like a collection of merchants and their online stores but a quick look a couple of weeks back revealed their new pitch around social shopping. Chandan told me that they have more than 3000 registered shoppers which is an underestimate since they did not require compulsory registration on the site till a couple of months back. Here is a presentation that Chandan sent across recently
I discussed ‘customer acquisition’ as probably the most important thing Storrz needs to focus on now. I also wonder whether social shopping works for all product categories. I saw MTR and some sweet sellers on Storrz’s list of merchants and wonder whether they are good targets for Storrz.
Another thing that comes to mind is whether customer acquisition will be faster if Storrz resorts to communities around products than build communities around Storrz users. The former is already getting executed by eBay neighbourhoods. The latter is really the domain for pure play social networks which Storrz is not.
PS> Chandan is try to raise a round of funding for Storrz which could start from as less as $500k to enable them to execute their business plan and reach their first set of targets set for year end 2008. Contact Chandan if you know anyone who can be interested.
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