GlowRoad is acquired by Amazon for an undisclosed sum, signifying the company’s debut into the social commerce area. While the corporation did not react to questions about the deal’s parameters, it is said to be an all-cash transaction.
With the debut of Flipkart Shopsy last year, Amazon’s main competitor in India, Walmart-owned Flipkart, joined the social commerce industry. Meesho and Dealshare are two other companies in the space.
“Amazon continues to explore new ways to digitise India and delight customers, micro-entrepreneurs and sellers, and bringing GlowRoad onboard is a key step in this direction. Together with GlowRoad, Amazon will help accelerate entrepreneurship among millions of creators, homemakers, students, and small sellers from across the country. This is a step further in Amazon’s commitment to digitise 10 million local Indian businesses by 2025,” shared an Amazon spokesperson.
He went on to say that combining GlowRoad’s social commerce platform with Amazon’s technology, infrastructure, and digital payment capabilities “is expected to bring improved efficiency and cost savings for everyone.”
Posted by Next Big Brand on Friday, April 22, 2022
Sonal Verma, Kunal Sinha, Nitesh Pant, Shekhar Sahu, and Nilesh Padariya established GlowRoad in 2017. Users can resale products directly from manufacturers and distributors through social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook.
GlowRoad’s Linkedin page claims that the platform has over 6 million dealers from over 1,000 locations across India. Women from tier 2 and beyond cities are claimed to make up the majority of resellers on the platform. The company employs between 201-500 people. Accel, CDH China, Korea Investment Partners, and Vertex are among the investors in GlowRoad.
Social commerce is a difficult business to build in a long-term manner. On the on-demand side, it’s quite competitive, with several firms vying for customers’ attention, and it’s also costly in terms of transportation costs.
There have been a series of small layoffs and consolidations in the social commerce market in recent months. Singapore’s Shopee shut down its India business just six months after launching. In an effort to improve efficiencies, Meesho, another social commerce business, recently off 150 staff from its grocery segment.
