Taking e-commerce To Small Towns

Co-founder of ShopClues Radhika Ghai has built the Indian unicorn brick-by-brick over the last six years. From a  10-member unit in 2011 to a family of over 1,100 members, Ghai has nurtured ShopClues as her baby. As she says, “ShopClues is my third baby.” Under her guidance and leadership, the e-commerce player has panned out to service over 32,500 pincodes in the country with over 28 million products from over 6 lakh merchants. Her zeal of inculcating women entrepreneurs has ensured that 30 per cent of ShopClues’ merchants are women.

Ghai along with her co-founders has tread a path not many e-commerce companies thought of. She identified the untapped market beyond metropolitan and tier-1 cities of India. To her, the shoppers of Bharat were ignored and so were the sellers from Bharat — where Bharat is beyond metropolitan and tier-1 cities.  Under her stewardship, ShopClues has emerged as a leading e-commerce player in tier-2, 3, 4 and beyond. Estimated to be a $25 billion market in India, e-commerce is poised to grow at a CAGR of over 31 per cent and is slated to be a $150 billion industry by 2025. Ghai has enabled ShopClues to think out of the box and create exclusive labels in categories such as fashion & lifestyle and home & kitchen. She realised the potential of taking affordable, quality products to the people. Today, ShopClues — with a base of around 4 crore loyal consumers — has over 70 per cent of its consumers from the hinterland.

A recipient of the Ministry of Women & Child Development’s ‘First Ladies’ Award for being the first lady in e-commerce to lead a unicorn company, Ghai has also been awarded the CEO of the Year by CEO Asia, Tech Women- Entrepreneur of The Year Award at the Disruptive Tech and Innovation Awards 2016 and the 2016 She The People — Best Marketplace Award.   Ghai also serves as Super Mentor for government of India’s Atal Innovation Mission, aimed at establishing 500 Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATLs) in schools across India and 100 Atal Incubation Centers (AICs) in both academic and non-academic spaces.