With a 48% of signups from retail businesses in tier 3 cities, 18% from tier 2 cities, and 34% from tier 1 cities, DotPe is helping these businesses reach their potential and fostering financial inclusion and empowerment in the heart of ‘Bharat’. Interestingly, the pandemic has thrown a spotlight on tier 2 and 3 cities scope of digitization, making them the growth engines of the economy. Most of the traction is coming from states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and key verticals that is generating huge demand is – clothing & fashion, supermarkets, departmental stores and kirana stores.
The pandemic impacted retail businesses adversely, particularly those beyond metro cities, when they were losing revenues due to roadblocks such as customers not being able to visit the stores to make purchases, supply functions being disrupted, lack of physical cash flow, among others. DotPe was launched in 2020 to address these gaps and assist entrepreneurs across different scales to digitize their businesses, end-to-end, in a bid to stay relevant and grow. The company has various partnerships not just for deliveries, but also with payment vendors such as GooglePay, Paytm, and PhonePe, to support higher-order volumes.
In a statemet, Shailaz Nag, Co-Founder, DotPe said, “At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, we realized that there was a significant demand-supply mismatch in the retail industry in India that could be solved through digitization. Led by our model for retail merchant empowerment, we had witnessed a 100% surge when the first and the second waves of the pandemic hit India. The third wave is expected to bring further uptick to the business. Growing at the rate of 20%, month-on-month, we have already onboarded over 55,000 merchants within the last 20 days. DotPe has a long-term vision of empowering 30 million retailers in India by creating a customer base of 1.3 billion.”
The company has expanded its business, pan-India with a larger focus on Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh.