Excell2sell.com is India’s largest, pure B2B online marketplace for ageing assets. With a registered partner base of over 24,000 pure B2B players, the company has a lead in the sector that connects close to 200,000 businesses. Team Optimist spoke to Rajan Sharma, Founder & CEO, Excess2sell about their incredible journey, which has solved unsold inventory issues that B2B companies faced.
Team Optimist: How did the Excess2sell.com idea come up? Did you have any earlier work experience in this niche sector?
Rajan Sharma: Before Excess2sell was founded, while we were working as professionals, we faced a lot of hurdles over excess and ageing inventory. This blocked the company’s capital and reduced sales turnover. We began to explore ways to overcome this situation across channels. Excess2sell was conceived to tackle the perennial problems faced by stockists with unsold inventories.
Excess2Sell was co-founded by Anant Chaturvedi and Navinder Chauhan as Directors and me as its CEO. All three of us, in our professional careers, were in leadership positions at Gigabyte, Digisol, Digilite, D-Link and iREVO, which were traditional product companies. Our experience wasn’t exactly in what we’re doing today, but we experienced the same issues of unsold inventories. This brought us together to form Excess2sell.com as a universal solution to B2B players’ biggest problem of liquidating excess inventory.
Team Optimist: What were the initial hurdles you had to face? How did you overcome them?
Rajan Sharma: When we started operations, taxation was a complicated aspect and we had to build our platform logic by taking into account various tax structures across the states and Union Territories. Fortunately, GST was on the horizon and it was just a matter of time before it came into effect to allow seamless movement of goods. Our domain expertise and experience also helped us tide over early obstacles.
Unlike in B2C e-tailing, B2B e-commerce requires a firm foundation and organic growth matters the most. Our traction growth was relatively slow, but our business terms were stringent. We always insisted on advance payments from buyers, never maintained any inventory, nor a warehouse and all three of us made tremendous efforts at delving into our vast network of buyers and sellers to convince them to come onboard. Gradually, the business began to gain traction and we ensured that our credibility for the long term was built. The other challenges were to maintain a young team of developers, designers and support executives. The admin was gung-ho about the vision of building a great platform to solve the problem of excess inventory. The initial struggle and hardship helped us evolve into the organization we are today.
Team Optimist: How does Excess2sell.com operate? What makes this a unique platform for the buyer?
Rajan Sharma: Exess2sell.com is an online liquidation platform that brings buyers to sellers in the B2B marketplace. It’s India’s biggest online marketplace that helps large Indian B2B companies liquidate their unsold, ageing inventories. The company reaches over 200,000 B2B businesses and has a registered seller-buyer base of over 24,000 players. The online platform, along with our mobile app, transacts 10,000 deals, roughly across 11 verticals in over 340 product categories.
B2B players are often stuck with unsold inventories, which, with time, begin to depreciate. The current ecosystem for such ageing stocks is skewed as it doesn’t allow the seller to openly disclose the reason for discounting stocks to its existing buyer base. Overcoming this limitation, Excess2sell offers a confidential, anonymous and neutral platform for both buyers and sellers in the B2B space. So, while the buyer benefits from choosing the best deals, the seller in the B2B segment, for the first time, has a market for unsold inventory that they can fall back on. The overstock ageing inventory segment is a huge opportunity as most B2B business verticals in India are still unorganized and we have a ‘first-mover’ advantage which we intend to capitalize on fully.
Team Optimist: What’s the future of the B2B e-commerce market in India?
Rajan Sharma: Without a doubt, e-commerce is here to stay and thrive. But you can see that, in the B2C space, e-commerce has flourished, while, in the B2B space, it has been largely neglected. However, the B2B segment, too, will have to embrace e-commerce because of obvious and quantifiable benefits. At present, in the B2B segment, we’ve managed to penetrate the most with our USP by helping B2B players liquidate excess and ageing stocks. This is only the tip of the iceberg and, if a transaction turnover of INR 100 crore within a span of just three years is any indication, we believe that the B2B e-commerce market has much ground to cover.
Team Optimist: Do you think the B2B industry in India demands a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to make it a bigger market base?
Rajan Sharma: Retail business in India is estimated to be in the range of USD 560 billion to USD 600 billion across verticals. This comprises a huge ecosystem of B2B stakeholders, including distributors, wholesalers and dealers. The ecosystem needs a comprehensive framework of policies in times of changing business models and online marketplaces. Excess2sell, being present on both sides of the buyer and seller ecosystems, understands these issues.
Team Optimist: With such a high profit-sharing percentage, Excess2sell.com has already become a brand. What’s its USP?
Rajan Sharma: Our work ethos is honesty, transparency and ethics, which have helped us grow to this level. We owe our success to an excellent team that works 24×7 to transform our vision into reality and also to the thousands of buyers and sellers who have reposed faith in our business model.
Team Optimist: What are your plans for Excess2sell.com? Are you planning to focus on key segments?
Rajan Sharma: Excess2sell is currently consolidating its buyer and seller ecosystems across the country and is poised to grow even more rapidly in the coming years. Apart from the established product categories on the platform, the company is focusing on promoting newly added verticals that include apparel, electrical goods, home appliances, LED lights, accessories and other luxury items. The company is investing in building its human resources infrastructure to meet the growth challenges.
This includes creating talent pools in various cities across the country with focus on bringing the best technology talents onboard. The company has chalked out a clear roadmap in terms of new features, such as supply chain integration and real-time buyer and seller connect, among others. Excess2sell is confident of clocking USD 50 million sales revenue in FY20 to maintain its position as the first choice for unsold overstock, excess inventory liquidation.
