Shopalike’s India Plans: Expanding categories, strengthening team

Berlin-based Shopalike.in, a relatively new entrant in India’s e-commerce space operates multiple shopping platforms across Europe under brands LadenZeile and Shopalike. The portal is now looking at India growth and on the company’s agenda is: launching new product categories by partnering with more traders and expanding its India operations team in Berlin.

Visual Meta incorporates products from thousands of online retailers with a focus on fashion, furniture and lifestyle. The advanced product search allows users to find the desired products quickly and compare items. Currently, the company operates across 20 countries and works with more than 6,000 partners. The clients vary from online shops such as Amazon, Flipkart and Zalando, to manufacturers such as Esprit and other exclusive specialty shops.

Increasing India presence

Elaborating on their India strategy, founders Robert M Maier and Johannes Schaback say, “Since we started operations in India only a few months ago, we are currently focusing on strengthening our platform by signing up more partner shops. We are planning to add more categories and to improve our filters as well as the possibility to save personal preferences in a user profile. We haven’t yet gotten into serious online or offline advertising and are in the process of locking in on an effective social media strategy for the New Year. We are also hiring for our Indian team in Berlin.”

The company has also developed a new mobile app designed to delight online shoppers. The application can be downloaded for free across Android, iOS and Windows interfaces and is a more streamlined and intuitive interface of the site. To further facilitate the search for a specific product the customers can use filters such as brand, colour, material, size or store desired and sale etc.

Shopalike tries to differentiate itself as a shopping platform aggregating the products of many different shops. It showcases many products and brands against an average e-commerce shop. “Put simply, the entire inventory of our partner shops is available on one site: Shopalike.in. We’ve already got over 30 partner shops as of today and more than 1.2 million fashion and lifestyle products on our platform,” they explain.

Steer-clearing the hurdles

In 2014, Visual Meta entered Asia by launching Shopalike.in, after it was convinced that India is a great market for its products. As the second largest country in the world with an ever growing internet population, India was on the company’s map ever since. “However, entering the Indian market was quite an adventure for us,” they say, adding, “simply because it’s the first country we were entering in Asia and we needed to adapt to local regulations and laws. India is a completely different market from European ones, we had to conduct a thorough market analysis to identify opportunities and risks and potential competitors. Most important for us was the analysis of the online shops in India, since they are our potential paying customers.”

The platform offers fashion and lifestyle products including clothes, shoes, bags, accessories such as sunglasses, watches, caps, bags, travel luggage, handbags, beauty and make up, et al. “The idea was to make lives easier for online shoppers, with a technical challenging product for developers with hardly any set up costs which could work internationally and would be in the field of e-commerce. That’s how Shopalike/Visual Meta was born. Since the idea was developed along with Rocket Internet, they became the first investor from the beginning,” inform Maier and Schaback. In 2011, 75 percent of Visual Meta was sold to Axel Springer SE, the leading German publishing group, with Maier and Schaback still owning a combined 20 percent.”