"We have seen online sales rise from being a small part of our business to forming the major part of it. Zoho helped us automate many tasks that we did manually. We are a small company without many resources so this is important."
-Amit Gupta
Founder, Sahivalue
The company
Sustainable practices have gained significance in business in the last few years. Thanks to that, reselling and refurbishing items have become all the more significant. Sahivalue is a top company in Mumbai in the refurbished electronic gadgets industry, focusing on products like mobile phones, tablets, iPads, MacBooks, laptops, and AirPods.
The challenge
Trust being the mainstay of their business, Sahivalue's focus has been on becoming the number-one trusted brand in this space. They faced many challenges in growing their business until they found the ideal ecommerce platform.
"When we started, we had a simple website which showed our product catalog but you couldn't buy directly from it—you had to call us. Our backend was on Excel and we used it for tracking orders and inventory," says AMit Gupta, Founder, Sahivalue.
Solution and benefits
"Our business was small and we started a physical store. But over time, we felt it was not scalable. It became critical to have an ecommerce strategy during the lockdown because the physical stores were shut. We considered Shopify but went with Zoho Commerce since it best suited our needs," Amit says.
Sahivalue was able to promote its business more effectively after switching to Zoho Commerce. Since the company is in the refurbished gadgets industry, Zoho Commerce's server-side APIs were a big selling point for Sahivalue. "Zoho helped us automate many tasks that we did manually. We are a small company without many resources so this is important."
With inventory on the backend, stock keeping is also automated. "There is no manual entry required now since the details get updated automatically," Amit revealed. "Even pricing has become easier."
The ecommerce store has enabled the company to market its brand better and create an enjoyable shopping experience for all its customers.
"Zoho Commerce has all the features needed for a world-class product. But two things stood out for me—it was easy to integrate Zoho Commerce with other Zoho products and the store was up and running the very first day!
We use Zoho Books for accounting and Zoho Inventory for inventory management. These are all seamlessly integrated with the online store. A lot of the work can be monitored while the employees are working from home. We even linked Zoho Analytics with Commerce and suddenly had a slew of reports and data that we never had before. This helped us serve the customers better," Amit said.
The service provided by the Commerce team was another plus point for Amit. "The helpful nature of the Commerce team and the wider Zoho community was a huge added advantage," he noted. "They understood my business process and helped me think about how I could effectively use the products in the Zoho ecosystem."
The road ahead
Sahivalue began using Zoho in 2020 and since then has seen its business grow by three times. "I feel that anyone with a physical store should also build an online store," Amit advised. "We have seen online sales rise from being a small part of our business to forming the major part of it. The question only is how and when you should transition to ecommerce. We are glad we made it happen with Zoho Commerce."