What is BuildMyMart? An Affordable ecommerce platform in India 2024
Ecommerce introduction
In the past decade, India has shown exponential growth in ecommerce. This increased dramatically post-COVID, also facilitated due to infrastructure growth and affordable internet services.
Ecommerce, as you might know, refers to buying and selling goods, or services, over the Internet. In India, the ecommerce market size in 2023 was estimated to be $63 billion. It is expected to grow by $107 billion in 2027.
The roots for ecommerce, in India, were originally marketplaces, such as Amazon, Myntra, or Flipkart, which have since gained huge popularity. There are other equally effective, often better, alternatives to marketplaces. Selling on your online store(domain), using e-commerce platforms, is one such alternative.
While selling on your online store might seem cost-effective and impactful, some challenges are worth mentioning, particularly for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). SMBs often struggle due to limited resources, such as ecommerce technical know-how, capital, and manpower.
To overcome these challenges, ecommerce platforms can offer cost-effective solutions that are relatively easy to use and can adapt to growing business needs. In this blog, we will be discussing BuildMyMart, which is one such platform that helps SMBs grow effectively and rapidly in the ecommerce space.
What is BuildMyMart?
BuildMyMart is an affordable, self-hosted, secure, and easy-to-use ecommerce platform. Subscription priced as low as Rs. 9999 / year and packed with features; it empowers small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to build, launch, and manage their ecommerce store.
The interface is simple and easy to use; hence even non-technical business owners can launch, and manage their ecommerce store.
BuildMyMart vs. Marketplaces and other ecommerce platform
It would be worthwhile to compare BuildMyMart with the marketplace and other existing ecommerce platforms.
A marketplace is a platform where buyers and sellers come together, to trade for goods or services. Ecommerce marketplaces, such as Amazon or Flipkart, offer a prebuilt store for all merchants, which often comes with a hose of potential customer pipeline.
In Marketplaces, since the store is already prebuilt, you save time on building the store. Here you as a merchant, would be selling alongside thousands of merchants, some of whom would be directly competing with you, with similar products, and more importantly for the same customer base. The way these marketplaces are set often results in a price war between merchants, which eventually erodes merchants' actual profit margins.
With Ecommerce platforms, like Shopify or BigCommerce, you would have the tools and services required, to help build your store, on your domain. The obvious benefit is that you can effectively control the user experience. However, with these platforms, you would first need to learn how to use them, to help you build your store. This would need resources, time, effort, and know-how to build. Most often, merchants end up going to agencies or development companies, to build and manage the store, this significantly increases the cost and dependency on partners. All of this significantly increases the cost and eventually, the time to profit.
BuildMyMart’s vision is to be an affordable, impactful, and easy-to-use platform. We endeavor to significantly reduce your Total Cost of Ownership while providing an impactful solution. What this means is that not only is it affordable, but it also helps merchants independently build and manage their stores, with minimal or no interventions.
How to use BuildMyMart to build your online store?
Now you can easily build, launch, and manage your store. With a few easy clicks, uploads, and configurations, you can easily get started. Here are the steps to get started
Step 1
First, choose a domain name for your business and you get the template with placeholder to get started.
Step 2
Organizing the store. This will include your product and category details and your payment and shipping integrations.
Step 3
Once everything in the store is in order, it is time to launch and start selling online. Moreover, BuildMyMart offers a free 3-week trial and has two subscription plans available, which are basic and advanced.
What are the features of BuildMyMart?
Ecommerce has made shopping a lot easier for buyers. BuildMyMart not only makes online purchases easy for the buyers, but it also makes it easy and fun for the merchants. Some key features it has to offer.
1. Self-Hosting platform –
BuildMyMart is a self-hosted ecommerce platform, you don't have to pay any additional cost, for hosting your online store. The hosting has required security measures, including secure data storage and regular backups.
2. Easy-to-use and beautiful online store –
The online store interface is user-friendly and aesthetically appealing. Even nontechnical business owners could start using it to launch and manage the store. The online store is easily compatible with laptops, mobile, and tablet devices.
3. Checkouts and payments –
The checkout and payment process is simple and fast, resulting in lesser bounce-out. There are multiple payment options including transactions through UPI, Credit and debit cards, Net Banking, and payment partnership with CCAvenue provides secure payments and seamless checkout.
4. Cart Abandonment -
Oftentimes, buyers search for products, and put them into the cart, but don’t finish the final purchase. It is now possible to identify abandoned carts and ensure timely followups and eventual conversions. This significantly increases the conversion rate resulting in higher revenues.
5. Variant pricing –
Most often, products have variants that need to be accounted for, including their pricing. For example, a T-shirt, in an apparel store, would have a variant like Size (Small, Medium, and Large) or Color (White, Blue, or Green). In BuildMyMart, these are easily adjusted, at no extra cost. As per your product catalog, you can have the freedom to add variants, based on your needs.
6. Wallet functionality –
Wallet functionality is available for customers who are making purchases from the store. It provides a flexible payment option for those who want to pay directly without the hassle of adding card information every time. Apart from an elevated customer experience, due to the convenience, it typically increases the buyer spending on the store.
7. Coupons –
Coupons often encourage buyers to spend more on the store. BuildMyMart provides the freedom to add specific discount coupons on store purchases. Merchants can decide the discount percentage based on their cash flow news and those products that they might want to offload sooner, based on their inventory.
Conclusion
With a plethora of options available in the market, be it marketplaces or ecommerce platforms things might get overwhelming and confusing. Often most small businesses end up subscribing to either marketplaces or ecommerce platform services and their expensive offerings, some of
which they might not need, for the prices offered, but end up paying anyway. Often falling trap to the marketing tactics and promotions on those specific services, due to the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). The eventual impact is a much longer return on investment, oftentimes costing an arm and a leg. Sometimes never recover the initial expenses and later struggle to support the high operational cost.
For small and medium businesses, there is a better alternative, by wisely investing in BuildMyMart, as your ecommerce partner. It not only provides an affordable, easy-to-use, and impactful platform to launch your store but also helps you reduce your overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Thus, helping you generate higher profit margins and eventually controlling your ecommerce destiny.
