E-commerce 2.0

Bulbul and simsim’s video bridge between rural India and e-commerce

Video commerce has been a roaring success in China. Now, Indian startups want to replicate the model and convince Indians in tier-3 towns and beyond to shop online. Just one problem—India is not China

Vandana, 5 Feb 2020

As investors & startups look for ways to bring more shoppers online, video commerce offers an alternative

Rising penetration of internet, payments and the recent success of short video apps are great enablers

The success of video commerce startups in China has encouraged VCs to back companies like Bulbul and simsim to do the same in India

The combination of cheap, poor quality products and high customer acquisition costs, though, makes success harder to come by

Sanjay Patel, an 18-year-old labourer at a glass factory in Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh, spends around two hours a day on the short video app TikTok. Last month, while watching a video, he came across a link for Bulbul Shop, an e-commerce platform with a difference—Bulbul uses videos to sell products.

In one of the videos, a woman host showcased a phone from a brand Patel hadn’t heard off.

AUTHOR

Vandana

Vandana is based in Delhi. She covers vertically focussed startups in consumer internet space and also writes on travel tech and smartphones for The Ken. She has spent 13 years in journalism covering a wide range of subjects- equity markets, mutual funds to education and skilling, working at organisations such as Business Standard, CNBC TV18 and The Week in the past.

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Bulbul and simsim’s video bridge between rural India and e-commerce