Social Commerce Platform Coutloot Launches 'Automatic Bargaining' For Shoppers

Coutloot, India's leading social commerce platform built on the lines of Taobao, launched a feature that allows both buyers and sellers to bargain automatically. 

The 'Automatic Bargain' feature provides the buyer with a pre-set bargain price within a chatbox. The buyer then can select and quote a favorable price, which the buyer thinks is fair for the product. 

"India has always been an assisted shopping market where we shop via assistance through up-selling and getting the right price from the seller via bargaining. Coutloot has brought offline retail sellers and street vendors to sell online for the first time in their lives and made it possible for buyers to live-bargain with the seller without having to wait for the seller to be online. Our auto-bargain feature makes a deal quickly between the buyer-seller instantly," said Jasmeet Thind, Founder, Coutloot, in a statement.

Coutloot, which raised around $8 million recently from Ameba Capital, 9Unicorns, and Astarc Ventures, expects to increase the conversion rate by 15 times with the Auto Bargain feature, thus growing the sales volume.

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The platform provides an online space for over six lakh local sellers to sell their products across the country. The products sold on Coutloot are indigenous and don't even bear an MRP tag. So, while Coutloot helps these sellers get the best price for the local products, shoppers can buy products within their budget.

Taking the Chat and Bargaining feature a step forward, Coutloot has also recently rolled out a chat feature in 12 different Indian languages that have broken the language barriers between the sellers and buyers, helping bring the smallest and most remote sellers to a big platform. 

"By analyzing billions of data points on Coutloot, we realized that price and chatting with sellers drives intent and trust for the buyers, which helps sellers sell fast and close the deal at the right price. It is a win-win for both sellers and buyers. Coutloot is on a mission to humanize and Indianise e-commerce for a billion people, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel when you can aggregate what's already happening at mass scale," Thind added. 

Founded by Jasmeet Thind and Mahima Kaul, Coutloot is a platform that allows buyers and sellers to bargain while shopping. It helps sellers list non-MRP, unbranded local market products across fashion, electronics, home decor, sports, and other boxed categories that makeup 75 percent of India's retail sector at present.

Coutloot's best-performing sellers belong to towns like Nagaon in Assam, Basai near Gurugram, Korba in Chhattisgarh, Surat in Gujarat, and Ludhiana Punjab. It has over 20 million listings on its app.

The company, growing at a CAGR of 300 percent over the last three years, is looking to clock a platform GMV of Rs 1,000 crore by 2022 on the back of rising demand coming from smaller towns.