1.How did you get the ideas to start with this and elaborate on the functional business model of the company?
Founders come with rich experience in e-commerce, digital marketing, brand building and operations to offer marketing consulting to brands. They saw how brands were struggling with performance marketing and decided to focus on this domain. After initial success in improving brands’ marketing ROI, they soon realized that tech was becoming a bottleneck for the brand to achieve the true scale and performance. The founders decided to create their own brandstore platform to address this and found instant uptake for the tech-marketing combo. Brands then asked for help in managing the warehousing since managing turnaround times, and SLAs of marketplace wasn’t their core skill. We realised that this would create a compelling bundle of solutions and there is an enormous scope to leverage tech to enable this for brands. We offer full-stack e-commerce solutions to help brands sell on brandstore (their own website) and marketplaces (Amazon, Flipkart etc.)Our solutions being brandstore tech platform, end-to-end performance marketing, marketplace and warehousing operations.

2. What changes have been observed in the growth patterns of the company before and during the pandemic?
While ANS Commerce has been growing strongly even pre-COVID, COVID has no doubt accelerated the growth. We are currently doing ~50 $Mn of GMV which has doubled from previous quarter. COVID has provided us strong tailwinds and we see us growing at 20% m-o-m basis . Due to COVID we see threefold impact on our business has been that end consumer are shopping online more (2X increase in traffic and GMV), inbound interest across the client spectrum and there has been faster closure of sales pipeline as companies want to leverage e-commerce ASAP.

3.What more does the future entail in lieu of the same?
We are currently run-rating at ~$2Mn annualized revenue and will exit this FY21 at ~$3.5Mn (ARR). This will be on a base of ~$50M annualized GMV currently which shall grow to ~$80M in annualized GMV by end of FY21. Further we are working with ~75 brands currently and should exit the year at 200+ brand partners.

4. What new technological advancements/ innovations have the company planned for?
We are product tech and data driven startup. The idea is to marry our experience and product knowledge and make magic happen for our clients. We have the broad product architecture in place, now the focus is to enhance it through various micro-products and push the performance for the brands.

We have our own brandstore platform – Kartify which is pre-integrated with 50+ partners (such as Unicommerce, Fynd, Razorpay, Netcore etc.). We keep innovating it with enhancements such as Gift Card module, PhonePe store etc. Along with that we have in-house tools for e-commerce marketing and we are planning to leverage ML to drive ROI for clients automatically, at scale. We are  also overhauling the entire approach towards e-commerce warehousing and fulfilment and have developed several products which can rival the best of the international marketplaces. Some of these are –  Recofy – to reconcile inventory, payments, marketplace orders etc.; B2C OMS, Ops Command Control, Marketplace intelligence etc.

5. A full-stack e-commerce enablement company that ANS commerce is, what makes it distinct amongst others in the industry?
What makes us different is our unique full stack offering - one accountable partner for your all e-commerce needs, product based approach - scalable & efficient problem solving, leveraging cross-industry and cross functional insights.

6. What can be said about the company's plans to raise a Series A funding?
We’ve raised a small round of $300,000 from angels & friends and have been very capital efficient. While we are profitable, we feel this is the right time to accelerate growth and would be look to raise pre-series A/ series A capital from VCs.

7. Where do you see the brand, 5 years down the line?
We aspire to drive 1% of all e-commerce sales in India by 2026 and be the preferred partner for every brand in the country for ‘all-things-ecommerce’. Over the next 5 years, we will work towards this goal, sign-up more partners, develop more/ better products, drive value to our clients and have fun as a company.