Indian food delivery and quick commerce startup Swiggy is getting into the link-building game to expand its customer base. Swiggy Minis, a Shopify alternative for small businesses to build their own online stores, is pivoting to become a link-in-bio service, similar to Linktree. Minis will now also cater to service providers like nutritionists and fitness trainers.
Contacted for comment, Swiggy said it revamped Minis’ homepage to focus on repeat purchases.
“As a SaaS platform, Minis’ primary goal is enabling sellers to create operational websites swiftly. We’ve observed strong traction originating from sellers’ social media pages and have therefore decided to prioritize this channel for discovery,” a Swiggy spokesperson told TechCrunch.
However, it may have also suffered from low usage. In an email newsletter sent to sellers that was seen by TechCrunch, the company wrote that only 5%-10% of customers were arriving on merchants’ store pages directly through Swiggy Minis.
Swiggy Minis will now act as a landing page that sellers can point their target customers to from their social media pages. The company said it will add integrations with Google Calendar soon so service providers can have a booking module.
Swiggy started Minis as an experiment in 2022 to provide a no-code Shopify alternative to small sellers. It allowed merchants to create sites, upload their catalogs and manage orders, shipping and transactions without paying any commissions. Swiggy also offered a discoverable marketplace of sorts on its app, where end users could look for these stores.
With this revamp, the startup is taking away the discovery layer on Minis. Customers will still be able to see their saved stores or the stores that they have ordered from in the past.
Sellers using Minis will be able to set up pages with support for multiple social links and themes. The company is keeping its no-commission policy.
The company added that it is expanding its service beyond physical products to accommodate digital offerings from different service providers. As well as the Google Calendar integration, it is adding Google Reviews as a rating system for these service providers.
Swiggy said it has notified sellers about the discovery layer for shops going away. Merchants who relied on Swiggy’s Minis discovery mechanism to reach customers will need to promote their shop elsewhere.
The company claims that even without the discovery layer, Swiggy Minis offers better conversion rates than other platforms. Plus, because customers can see their past orders and favorite shops in the Minis section, shops can expect more repeat customers, according to Swiggy.
Other link-in-bio services, like Linktree, offer both appointment booking and storefronts. Patreon has also been adding tools that let fans support their favorite creators in different ways.
Swiggy, which plans to raise $1.25 billion through an initial public offering in India, has concentrated on scaling up its quick commerce platform, Instamart, in the last few years. The company competes with food delivery rival Zomato (which owns BlinkIt) and Lightspeed-backed unicorn Zepto in this space.
While BlinkIt and Zepto both partner with brands to sell on their platforms and promote their products, they don’t have a SaaS product for small sellers and creators.
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