StoreHippo builds mobile-ready, fully customizable, PWA stores

Launched in 2014, StoreHippo has enterprise customers in 20+ countries and 35+ business verticals. StoreHippo is an enterprise-grade SaaS-based e-commerce platform that offers turn-key e-commerce solutions to B2B, B2C businesses of all sizes. The do-it-yourself (DIY) platform enables high-volume enterprise businesses to go-to-market in a fraction of time as compared to legacy software.

StoreHippo is the pioneer in mobile commerce, and the first SaaS Ecommerce platform to adapt a headless web app architecture. It is designed to give brands a strong omnichannel presence, better user experience and higher sale conversions across digital touchpoints.

StoreHippo’s highly flexible service-oriented architecture, powered by AI and automation, gives businesses the ability to implement diverse B2B, B2C and B2B2C business models in no time.

Here, Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal, Founder and CEO, StoreHippo, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: Please give us a brief about StoreHippo and its business model?

Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal: Started in 2014, StoreHippo is the most flexible enterprise e-commerce platform designed for diverse B2B, B2C, D2C and enterprise business models. Driving success with innovative solutions, StoreHippo envisions giving powerful solutions to brands that need a mobile-ready and customizable solution to rule the market.

With the headless commerce architecture at its core, StoreHippo builds mobile-ready PWA stores that are fully customizable and have a quick turnaround time. StoreHippo offers fully integrated solutions for enterprise brands where they can integrate ERP, CRM, accounting, and any other software of their choice.

DQ: How is StoreHippo helping enterprises scale up businesses?

Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal: StoreHippo being a leading enterprise e-commerce platform in India is a part of the inspiring journey of customers in 25 countries across 40+ industry verticals. There is no doubt that your choice of enterprise ecommerce solution can make or break your business. All our online stores are built with PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) to make your site look and work like native apps on multiple devices. It helps the business to maximize growth and reach new heights of success.

Our wholesale ecommerce platform offers 300+ inbuilt features and tools to help enterprise businesses in improving efficiency, market reach while reducing their cost. The advanced conversion-focused features and inbuilt marketing tools help in boosting online sales and help you achieve long-term business growth.

The offerings below makes StoreHippo the best enterprise ecommerce solution:

• High-performance and scalable solution
• Enterprise-grade security
• White labelling
• Extensive platform customizations
• B2B features
• Personalized user experiences.

DQ: What does StoreHippos’s B2B e-commerce solution offer?

Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal: With the passing time, B2B buyers are evolving and so are the platforms. StoreHippo offers advanced features for large-scale businesses with a mobile commerce edge. StoreHippo is designed for the diverse requirements of ecommerce business models.

The mobile-first, fully integrated and managed ecommerce platform enables B2B and D2C businesses to build fast-responding, customizable Omni-channel solutions designed for disruption. Built on the new-age MACH architecture for ecommerce, StoreHippo not only helps in building agile ecommerce solutions but also offers the merchants a complete ecosystem to run and grow their online business.

DQ: How is the D2C model a game-changer for startups/brands in India?

Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal: With consumers increasingly shifting to ordering online, the direct-to-consumer model has helped firms deliver goods faster, build trust and earn better profits. India being one of the largest and fastest-growing e-commerce markets, e-shopping got a tremendous uplift amid the pandemic.

Brands adopting the D2C model in India have been growing ever since the time of the pandemic in the Indian market. The change in consumer behaviour has prompted many brands to adopt the D2C model for directly reaching consumers.

D2C companies not only manufacture but also market, sell and ship their products directly to their customers. This is mainly done through the online medium removing the middlemen like distributors, wholesalers and retail stores. This is beneficial both for the brand as well as the customers. The brand saves a lot on costs and passes the benefits to customers who get the products at a lower cost.

Here are the benefits startups/brands in India gain from adopting the D2C model:

• Reach faster to market
• Increased control over brand, product, and reputation
• Omnichannel commerce
• More innovation, higher margins, and greater control
• Access to detailed data to gain a better understanding of the customer.

DQ: Elaborate on the role of scalable technological innovations in handling high volume traffic around the festive season.

Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal: StoreHippo SaaS-based ecommerce platform offers unparalleled and elastic scalability to businesses. This helps with peak load tolerance during the festive season and thus brands can easily handle the higher traffic of festive seasons without the need to buy additional server space.

StoreHippo also provides the most accessible, reliable, and robust shipping solutions to the customers with end-to-end logistics and fulfilment support. This enables the brands to sell with confidence worldwide around the festive seasons as well. StoreHippo enables its clients to build an automated, error-free and streamlined supply chain with timely shipping services in domestic and international markets.

Built grounds-up on the mobile-first principle, StoreHippo’s fully integrated, feature-rich, hosted and managed e-commerce platform enables brands to leverage m-commerce and reach more customers via mobile apps and PWA stores.

StoreHippo also has complete omnichannel solutions which help brands to control their sales on multiple channels through a common central admin. StoreHippo offers brands of every size and industry a complete ecosystem to run their online business.

StoreHippo’s headless architecture helps brands build cutting-edge multi-vendor marketplaces, a chain of multiple storefronts, multilingual stores in regional as well as international languages, complete hyperlocal e-commerce solutions and innovative business models using a combination of these features.

DQ: What are the challenges faced in building a multi-vendor marketplace and how to overcome them?

Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal: Adopting the multi-vendor marketplace strategy is becoming increasingly essential for businesses in the present times. It provides brands better opportunities to tap the unexplored markets by onboarding multiple vendors, from diverse geographical locations and to take their business a notch higher.

While this process of building a multi-vendor marketplace can be rewarding for businesses, it does come with its fair share of challenges. The primary hurdle that they often have to face in this journey is finding the right technology service provider that offers the complete solution to handle vendors, commissions, payouts, etc. It is essential for them to find the right tech partner that allows scalability and reduces the go-to-market time as well.

Other major challenges while building a multi-vendor marketplace range from order and inventory management, delivery management, competitive pricing, to managing the product lines, personalization requirements of the customers and optimally harnessing the power of customer data gathered from multiple shopping channels.

Organizations are always on the lookout for solutions that would enable them to upscale their operations. Also, the solutions should help them in efficiently building the multi-vendor marketplaces and overcoming all the aforementioned roadblocks. As a SaaS-based platform, StoreHippo is the ideal technology partner that offers comprehensive cutting-edge solutions for building any model, scale or size of multi vendor marketplace.

Its comprehensive marketplace solutions permit easy management of products for both vendors and customers. Vendors have complete transparency to upload, edit and upgrade product inventory whereas buyers get a rich catalogue of options to choose from along with competitive pricing. The admin gets full control and can easily monitor, edit, restrict or approve vendor activities. Hence, challenges are overcome while powering the online marketplace with the flexibility, scalability and agility it needs.

DQ: How is MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-Native, and Headless) architecture helping businesses?

Rajiv Kumar Aggarwal: MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) architecture enables businesses to transform their game-changing ideas into a reality by enabling them to develop innovative e-commerce solutions.

Using the powerful and flexible components of MACH, brands can build the most innovative solutions and quickly make changes to accommodate the new requirements of the business/market. MACH also offers unparalleled scalability to fast growing brands which helps them to scale to any number of users, products, locations, vendors, etc.

Brands can quickly add any number of customer touchpoints using the same backend code and APIs. This improves the go-to-market time remarkably giving brands a competitive edge. Also, it becomes easier to integrate with any third-party software or services to build efficient and tailor-made ecommerce systems for the brand. In nutshell, the MACH architecture is giving brands the freedom to explore, experiment and do things that were impossible with the legacy software.