‘WE ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THE WELLBEING OF EMPLOYEES’

Q. What is the insight into your latest ad campaign ‘Sahi sahi customer, toh business ek number’?
These days, a lot of sellers have come online and we have been able to grow very fast on the back of both suppliers and consumers who are growing on the platform. However, we have barely scratched the surface as far as the overall small business-potential that exists in the country is concerned. People still have apprehensions about the kind of customers they will get online. They have a certain type of customers that come and buy from their local shops and they are happy with that. So, they often think that the customers will be entirely different online and hence, they won’t be able to achieve success there. With this campaign, we want to completely break those apprehensions and give them the confidence that the customers at Meesho are the ones who are looking for the right quality, right price, and that they are the appropriate people for smaller businesses to come and serve.

In this process, we also want to highlight some of the industry-leading and clutter-breaking policies that we have introduced such as ‘zero-percent commission’, ‘zero-penalty’, ‘seven-day payment’ etc. to assure people that there is no reason to worry about coming online and doing business with Meesho.    

Q. You recently crossed 6 lakh seller registrations on the platform. Sellers from which regions and categories are registering more?
We are a horizontal platform and we want to democratize the internet-commerce. Nearly 70% of all Meesho sellers hail from tier 2+ cities such as Amritsar, Rajkot and Tiruppur, among others. With the kind of growth we are witnessing on our platform, we are even more focused on making deeper inroads into Bharat.

We want 100 million small and medium-size businesses to come online and succeed. When we started off, we had a lot of sellers from the fashion category. But now they are from multiple categories such as consumer electronics, home and kitchen, office supplies, stationary, pet supplies, books, musical instruments etc. Over time, we are going to be very category-agnostic and we will focus on categories wherever consumers’ share of wallet is going. So, the focus will not be limited to one or a few categories but will cover the entire spectrum of consumption. 

Q. You recently introduced a new unlimited paid leave policy for medical and mental health reasons. The employees can now avail up to 365 days of paid leave. What’s the objective?
Over time we have realized if we don’t have the best of people and if they are not happy at workplace and not getting taken care of, we will not be able to drive our business forward. From a people standpoint, that's a core principle. As a part of that principle, we have an overall program called MeeCARE which is aimed at holistic wellbeing for employees and their overall eco-system – their families. In that context, we have a broad spectrum of wellness initiatives and the new policy that you are talking about, is just one amongst many. As far as this policy is concerned, the employees are entitled to full salary payment throughout the tenure of leave for self-illness. They are entitled to 25% of their salary payment for three months if they take leave to care for unwell family members. We are concerned about the wellbeing of our employees and we try to ensure that our people are extremely productive and have the right kind of balance between work and life. There is yet another critical aspect which is to attract the best talents of the country to the organisation.  

Q. How many more sellers would you like to see on your platform in the current financial year? What sort of sale do you register in a day?
As you have pointed out in one of your questions, we have just crossed the mark of 6 lakh registered sellers. Over the course of this financial year, we want to double that number and take it up to 10-12 lakh.

In the earlier part of June, on a single day we clocked close to 53.5 lakh orders. That was a record for us in terms of single day sale and it happened at a time when there was no festival. So, it tells how rapidly we are growing and leading the entire growth in the e-commerce industry.