My sense of competition is, for an investor searching for them, it was not that difficult to find them. Just go to similarweb and search for robu’s statistics and it will show up all the competitor sites. One can compare some of the relevant statistics between all those players. Sahil has already posted some of those info in his post above.
But as an investor, we also have to understand that since the sector seems to have immense potential, we can’t rule out entry of other players. It’s not that kind of play. The play here is robu is well recognized player in this segment. The promoters with no background and funding have positioned themselves well on the basis of their merit. This business demands operational efficiency and lower cost is one of the parameters. Ultimately most of these players buy from someone and sell to others, mostly inventory stocking type model, managing inventory and working capital has a direct bearing on the results. Many times volume they buy will decide the price discount they manage to get from manufacturer and hence their costing. So big has good chance of becoming bigger.
Another aspect of product price, Imagine what %age of us directly go to flipkart/amazon for most of our needs vs checking every site possible to find the cheapest deal on each of the products we buy? This is a good example of 80-20 rule in practice. There might be 8 other sites which would have some of the products we buy available cheaper, yet most of us go to these 2 for most of our needs and don’t keep hopping from site to site for cheap price on each of our purchases.
We need some solid evidence to conclude this, isn’t it? Like similar nos. of others players ?
In vertical ecom sites, multiple players exist today doing well for themselves in their niche. Like BigBasket, Nykaa, indiamart etc etc… In theory anything can be done by big players since they have the money and sometimes these fears come true and these niche players can get destroyed or taken over. We have to keep our ears to the ground. But I think that’s not sufficient cause to avoid a nicely growing niche player out of fear of competition.
This is a good point. ~40% of customers are in 18-24 age category, most likely young engineers in college campuses (my hunch). This is a very important metric because most likely the brand name is getting passed on from senior students to juniors based on their experience. This lowers the customer acquisition cost, at the same time if something goes wrong in robu’s execution or some other stronger player emerges then this has equal chance to hurt. Bad experience news will spread faster. The customer base most likely has smaller communities and it won’t be just individuals like in other categories.
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