Bikroy, the leader in the online classified marketplace space in Bangladesh, has a growing B2B component. An increasing number of small and medium brick-and-mortar stores are opening shops on Bikroy to sell their products, apparently to take advantage of the huge marketing prowess of the platform that attracts around two million users a month.
Previously predominantly C2C and largely free, Bikroy has materially evolved as a platform over the past years. While most C2C users would sell used products through Bikroy before, now a growing number of B2B members are selling new products “we specialize in C2C but we have a large and growing B2B component,” says Misha Ali, Director of Marketing Bikroy, in an interview with FS, “about 25% of goods traded on Bikroy are new and are sold by our partners, mostly smaller brick and mortar retailers.”
The company, in fact, considers B2B component as one of its major contributors to the short-term revenue generation before it manages to monetize its large C2C users base and also grow the number of transactions that take place on Bikroy.
As part of its revenue growth push, Bikroy has implemented some bold and equally ingenious features and changes on its platform including limiting the number of free ads, introducing Buy Now Features where it takes care of every transaction that takes place on Bikroy.
The company has also introduced a membership model for small businesses in 2016, “we launched our Membership model early last year, with which a small business can have their own shop on Bikroy along with their own URL,” says Misha Ali. For a monthly fee, a member can get an exclusive shop page along with a custom URL. “Now businesses can use our vast marketing power to promote their products rather than building and trying to have their own e-commerce site which is expensive to build traffic for.” The company offers two separate levels of membership to businesses: business plus and business premium and the monthly fee varies depending on which membership model you take. Currently, Bikroy claims to have over 3000 paying members.
Bikroy has been investing heavily in bringing in more businesses on board. It employs a special category management team that works closely with B2B members and potentials clients and runs marketing initiatives targeting the B2B audience including offering shop signboards to business cards and the likes.
Bikroy has built a huge user base over the past years which puts it in a rather advantageous position when it comes to attracting B2B users who are looking for one more channel for sales that is to say that Bikroy will go further in the B2B space in the coming days.
