After Flipkart, Snapdeal launches easy financing platform CapitalAssist to fuel growth of sellers

Flipkart and Snapdeal seem to take every opportunity to compete aggressively against each other. After Flipkart partnered with semi government bodies to boost manufacturing and entrepreneurship in the country, Snapdeal has now launched, CapitalAssist. It is a platform to enable easy availability of capital for its sellers.

In line with Snapdeal’s vision to enable one million small businesses to do business online, CapitalAssist will further enable sellers on the platform by helping them meet their growing working capital requirement as they scale their businesses.

Banks and NBFCs can participate on the platform to provide seamless and low-cost financing to sellers on Snapdeal depending on their current and future business requirements.

Small and medium enterprises in India face major hurdles in terms of meeting their working capital requirements and raising low cost capital while attempting to grow their business. “This platform will significantly benefit the small and medium sized sellers on Snapdeal by enhancing their financial liquidity which will help them increase their sales exponentially on the site,” says, Rohit Bansal, Co-founder of Snapdeal.

The eligibility criteria for sellers to avail this service will be clearly defined by the company along with the funding partners (bank/NBFC) on Capital Assist. In order to ensure that Snapdeal sellers have significant flexibility, customized financing options will be offered to them based on their business category and requirement.

“We currently have around 50,000 sellers who are selling their products on Snapdeal.com, and during our association, we realised the issues they face while raising capital. We believe that this initiative will help them overcome this challenge to a large extent,” adds Rohit.

Earlier in June this year, Flipkart had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with FISME (Federation of Indian Micro and Small and Medium Enterprises) and NCDPD (National Center for Design and Product Development) to boost manufacturing and entrepreneurship in the country via infrastructural support in data analytics, marketing and customer acquisition to help them scale their business.

Besides these two e-commerce majors, leading online taxi aggregator Olacabs had also earmarked Rs.100 crores towards nurturing entrepreneurship among drivers to spruce up its supply ecosystem in the next one year.

Such moves by heavily funded e-commerce, including Snapdeal will certainly boost entrepreneurship and help small sellers to scale up their online channel with easy financing and infrastructural supports.

As of now, we have seen heavily funded e-commerce companies investing in technology, supply chain and attracting talent but now they are also investing to support small businesses, which will eventually bring more maturity to the entire e-commerce ecosystem.