This app gets small fashion merchants online and it just raised $8m from Sequoia and others

Photo credit: Zilingo.

Last time we checked with online marketplace Zilingo, the young startup had just raised seed funding worth US$1.88 million in a round led by Sequoia India.

The mobile-first company had around 300 sellers on its platform at the time. Almost a year later, Zilingo has 2,000 across Thailand and Singapore. It is growing at a steady pace and has just raised US$8 million for its series A round. Existing investor Sequoia is back to lead this round, along with Indonesia’s Venturra Capital and Hong Kong-based Susquehanna International Group (SIG).

Singapore-based Wavemaker Partners, Japan’s Digital Garage, and Beenext (entrepreneur Teruhide Sato’s fund) also participated.

Democratizing fashion

Zilingo’s core concept is helping small, independent offline sellers get online. The company provides full back-end support to those sellers, which includes an online seller center and an app they can use to upload product listings, manage inventory, schedule pickups, and do customer care and marketing.

The startup is doubling down on small sellers to whom customers don’t have easy access.

Sellers can also use the app’s built-in analytics platform to track their sales, do business intelligence and see their ratings. Zilingo doesn’t charge any fees for merchants to list on the platform, opting instead for a 10 to 20 percent commission on every successful transaction. It doesn’t disclose its current revenue numbers.

Although Zilingo can accommodate a wide variety of sellers, the company has chosen to focus on fashion and lifestyle. The reason, CEO and co-founder Ankiti Bose tells Tech in Asia, is that the company doesn’t want to play the price war game with larger ecommerce players who can aggressively discount, say, mobile phones and consumer electronics, even though it hurts their margins.

“We made the call to not do things that burn more money,” she explains.

Instead, the company is doubling down on small sellers to whom customers don’t have easy access and who can use the audience Zilingo brings them. Ankiti says the service has about 500,000 users, although it’s not specified how many are active. It does around 30,000 to 40,000 transactions per month. The conversion rate on the app is more than 4 percent, and around 3 percent on the web.

The Zilingo team. The startup now has a staff of 57 across four offices. Photo credit: Zilingo.

Smart shopping

The startup now plans to add more features to the platform. A key addition is in-app video content, which will allow sellers to showcase their offerings through Snapchat-like tools.

“You open the app or website and see a video that can be about seller stories, collections from the sellers, and so on,” Ankiti says. This gives merchants another way to showcase their offerings and makes the app more engaging, especially for younger demographics that are more keyed in to video content. It keeps them coming back even if they’re not buying something on every visit, she says.