I recently found about this new Indian startup called Dukaan that was founded at the start of the pandemic, saw tremendous growth in the last 7 months and now supports over 2.7M businesses. It’s often called ‘Shopify of India’.
Reading about it made me wonder, why wasn’t Shopify able to capture this opportunity. So here’s my full analysis + recommendation + mockups – Shop Stores.
TLDR: “For many small and micro businesses, Shopify isn’t feasible — as they either don’t have high-level software knowledge or technical resources (laptop) to use it. For others, Shopify is overkill. It’s a complex product for their simple needs — that ends up overwhelming them. For instance, a fruit seller just needs an app that offers a stacked product (fruit) page to his buyers and allows him to accept orders online.
Dukaan won because it allowed Indian sellers to create online stores free of cost, within 30 seconds and manage operations on their smartphone. While Dukaan captured the Indian market, Shopify can leverage Shop App to capture the global small and micro business market.
Imagine what if users could create a mobile-first online store on Shop App in less than a minute.”
Prashant Bagga 