An Amazon for cooperatives brings India’s artisans into the world of ecommerce

A man selling handmade bangles in Delhi, India.

You get all sorts of sellers on ecommerce sites: t-shirt vendors, stay-at-home moms who make jewelry, electronic shops that sell used (read: stolen) products. The diversity can make it seem like it’s an equal playing field. It’s not. In fact, those most successful on online marketplaces tend to exist in urban, well-connected areas where they can afford basic requirements needed to sell online, like internet access and infrastructure for pickup and delivery.

Until now, small producers in India have always solved issues of access by banding together in “cooperatives”, or groups of producers that work together in order to sell and market their products. Each producer owns an equal stake in the cooperative and has a vote on the important outcomes of the organization. India has over 500,000 cooperatives of different types, from food to artisanal crafts.

For instance, India’s largest dairy producer, AMUL, is a cooperative that employs over 3.37 million farmers and has an annual turnover of US$3.5 billion.

Unfortunately, with the advent of large-scale technology, franchised producers that sell online, and a general disruption of the manufacturing industry, the cooperative solution isn’t working as well anymore. That’s where GoCoop steps in.

GoCoop is an ecommerce site specifically designed to work with cooperatives and other clusters. It has multiple layers of services for the different types of sellers that work in cooperatives. For some, GoCoop sets up an account on its ecommerce site with features like shopping carts and payment gateways. For those who are focused on large scale B2B sales, GoCoop has a website listing service that allows customers to place bulk orders and ask about prices and shipping. For larger cooperatives, GoCoop provides independent website management services that include everything from capturing photos to site maintenance.

Coops can focus on selling their products

A man weaving a carpet in Delhi, India.

So, what’s the difference between selling on a regular ecommerce site and one specifically made for those outside urban India? “We don’t just tell people to sign up and deal with everything themselves – that’s not going to retain customers and make long-term changes,” explains Siva Devireddy, founder of GoCoop. He’s not lying – GoCoop manages to provide support for literally every single ecommerce pain point that one can think of. “Until things change, we’re taking those sort of things into our own hands,” says Siva.

Let’s start with payments. We all know the usual mantra: ecommerce doesn’t work well outside of urban India because very few people have credit or debit cards, cash on delivery is hard to track, and payment wallets have yet to catch on. GoCoop decided to solve this by shouldering the entire responsibility of the process.

“It makes end-to-end payment easier if you focus on the things you can do,” Siva says. After a customer purchases something on the GoCoop website, the money is transferred to GoCoop’s nodal bank account. From here, it moves into the account of the cooperative that the customer has purchased from. This entire transaction takes three days.

For the oft-cited issue of logistics, GoCoop has established cluster service representatives (CSRs) across cooperatives. Among other things, they are given the responsibility of sending and receiving packages. “Once we receive an order, we send it out to the appropriate cooperative,” Siva explains. “From there, our cluster service representative packages it and gets it out.” A majority of GoCoop’s services are completed by the India Post. As of 2011, the India Post had established 154,866 post offices. Of this number, nearly 90 percent were in rural India.

And, for those parts of India that have limited internet access, Siva explains that the GoCoop model ensures that a producer doesn’t need to spend much time online. “Unlike other ecommerce models, a producer does not need to keep checking on the status of their product. Our CSRs take care of all of that.”

From cloud computing to coop computing