Via the UK, Cashkaro Hits India with Coupons and CashBack

After enjoying good success over the past two years in the UK market, the cashback and discount coupons portal Pouring Pounds has entered into the Indian market with a new site called Cashkaro.

Cashkaro is one of a new breed of kind online portals in India that offers deal coupons along with cashback that makes for a good savings proposition when shopping online. Launched as a beta version early this year, the site now has deals for over 250 e-shopping brands, including big names like Myntra, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, and McDonalds.

“Without much in the way of marketing and promotions in India, we already have over 30,000 users on Cashkaro, since the website’s beta version launched in February. Around mid- April, we started our first Facebook marketing campaign and already have some 91,000 fans,” says Swati Bhargava, CEO and co-founder of Cashkaro.

Unlike some e-commerce and online shopping sites that offers Groupon-style daily deals, Cashkaro passes on the commission it gets from retailers and brands to the buyer in the form of cashback. For instance, if any user places an order or buys some stuff such as air tickets, clothes, or other items via Cashkaro, the user will end up paying less for the purchase compared to going directly to those retailing or ticketing portals.

Swati, a former Goldman Sach staffer who’s based in London, explains how the site monetizes:

We get commission only when the deal or transaction that happens on the site. The commission rate varies from one retailer to another. An online retailer like Snapdeal offers us a 7.5 percent flat commission, while Myntra.com offers cash Rs 180 ($3.10) over any purchase of above Rs 400 ($7) by the customer. Out of that commission, after keeping a small portion of it, the rest we pass on to the customers as cashback.

From Pounds to Rupees

Interestingly, Swati’s first-hand experience of starting doing this in the UK, under the Pouring Pounds brand, with her husband Rohan is coming in handy. The graduate couple from the London School of Economics gave up their high paying jobs to startup Pouring Pounds in 2011.

In the space of three years, Pouring Ponds has over 125,000 users and manages three websites for popular brands including the retail giant Tesco, the Daily Mail newspaper, and others loyalty rewards programs. Overall, Pouring Ponds has more than 2,500 brand partners across verticals including Marks and Spencer, Expedia, Hotels.com, Amazon, and others.

Recalling the early phase of Pouring Ponds, Swati says:

We put our own personal saving and funds at the start. However we were able to find an angel investor, Peter Radcliff, who invested around Rs. 42 lakh ($73,000) as seed funding.

Though in last year or so, India has seen many similar sites emerge – such as Cazbak.in, or the Europe-backed startup Flipit – Bhargava is highly confident that Cashkaro is now strongly rooted and will be a market leader – and she feels that the Indian market will see consolidation in this segment in the future.