Coutloot, a social commerce platform built on the lines of Taobao, said small towns now account for three-fourths of its business, gaining over 1500 basis points over last year.

Coutloot, which raised around $8 million from Ameba Capital, 9Unicorns, and Astarc Ventures, said it has more than 6.5 lakh sellers on its platform and expects to reach 3 million by the end of 2022.

“Small towns will outperform cities since the majority of India’s population still lives in small towns. While consumers won’t come to big cities, e-commerce will definitely go to them,” said Jasmeet Thind, co-founder at Coutloot. “Small town contribution was around 60% in 2020 which crossed to over 75% in 2021. Our sellers largely come from north and west markets with places like Ludhiana, Surat, Jabalpur, Raipur, Tirupur and small towns of UP leading the charge.”

Founded by Thind and Mahima Kaul, Coutloot is a platform that allows buyers and sellers to bargain while shopping. It helps sellers list non-MRP (non-fixed-price), unbranded local market products across fashion, electronics, home decor, sports and other boxed categories that account for three-fourths of India’s retail market.

By 2022, the platform is expecting GMV of Rs 1000 crore on the back rising demand coming from smaller towns. The products sold on Coutloot are indigenous and don’t even bear an MRP tag and it recently launched a feature that allows both buyers and sellers to bargain automatically.

“The ease of use, demand generation for small town sellers, languages, bargaining and automated translations are the key product led drivers. Instead of consumers adopting a product, in our case we have adopted the consumer behaviour and built the company around it,” added Thind.

The company also rolled out a chat feature in 12 different Indian languages to break the language barriers between the sellers and buyers, helping bring the smallest and most remote sellers to a big platform.

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