I found Shopify to be an expensive alternative. I checked the features on Zoho Commerce and it matched my requirements. I could create my own website. The interface was user-friendly, and this was an important factor for us since moms and grand moms are our regular users. Our online store on Zoho Commerce was easy for them to use.
Sathish,
Founder, Honcho Baby
The Company
Honcho Baby is a baby clothing store based out of Coimbatore, India. Started as a partnership in 2019, the business supplied bed linens to hospitals and hotels. Soon, demand rose from hospitals to provide kits for newborn babies and their mothers. This led the team to research more about the baby clothing market and realized there was a lot of work to be done here. Thus Honcho Baby was launched in 2020 to provide quality baby products.
The Challenges
After the pandemic, the team required course correction, and after gathering input from their research, they got fully into the baby wear segment. To keep a tab on the quality of the fabric and design, they decided to manufacture the products in-house.
"We created new designs for every season and our prints were all limited edition," Sathish said. "We wanted to create a homegrown brand that would not compromise on quality. Our first product got positive reviews from users, and now we have more than 20 products listed on our website." While there was a good set of products and a vibrant team, the bigger challenge now was to figure out how to sell.
Initially, we sold on social media and created an Instagram page. We tried getting some endorsements from celebrities, but the big question still remained: how do we make these transactions seamless? We began selling on Amazon, but we didn't get a good turnover or visibility. We went back to our drawing board, and our team decided to have our own ecommerce platform."
For the first seven months, Sathish ran Honcho Baby on Shopmatic but soon wanted some solutions to manage his expanding inventory. A friend told him about Zoho Commerce as a one-stop solution.
The Solution
There were several factors that pulled Sathish to Zoho Commerce. "I found Shopify to be an expensive alternative," he said. "I checked the features on Zoho Commerce, and it matched my requirements. I could create my own website. The interface was user-friendly, and this was an important factor for us since moms and grand moms are our regular users. Our online store on Zoho Commerce was easy for them to use." In 2021, Sathish moved to Zoho Commerce and later to Zoho One, where he uses Books, Inventory, Mail, and PageSense.
The Benefits
The integrations that came with Zoho Commerce made it a complete package, and Honcho Baby's inventory didn't require any manual updating. "The order tracking mechanism helped our customers, as they had been looking for it previously," Sathish said. "After moving to Zoho, we have seen a 100 percent jump in our customer base and are now supplying our products across India."
Sathish also wanted a fine look for the ecommerce website from the very beginning and decided to spend a good sum on the product photoshoot. "Photographs also reflect your quality, and we did not want to compromise on that," he said. "Also, many customers began sending pictures of their babies wearing our products. We began showcasing some of those pictures on our website, and this also helped us market our website better. This provided good engagement on our Instagram handle as well."
The Road Ahead
After having reached out to the market in India, Sathish wants to take his store to the world outside. "We are working on worldwide shipping and have begun work on documentation for that," he said. "We want to scale up our products as well and try new categories. This will help in making us a one-stop store for babies."