‘Valmo to streamline e-com supply chains’

NEW DELHI: Meesho on Wednesday launched logistics-focused platform Valmo aimed at tackling supply chain inefficiencies in e-commerce deliveries at the lowest cost.

“We want to ensure we are giving micro-entrepreneurs a platform. We will never build an asset of our own,” said Sourabh Pandey, chief experience officer, fulfilment and experience, Meesho. “So the way we do this today is to onboard the micro entrepreneurs across the network. We try to identify people who have the capability to do the different sets of operations across the length and breadth of what we deliver, as we give them capabilities for technology, network design, processes, operations and data analytics, so that they are able to process and ensure we are able to deliver these shipments seamlessly to end customers.”

“This gives us a no-frills cost structure, the overheads in the ecosystem reduce, because the micro entrepreneurs are very very good at managing costs as they are already working in that space,” Pandey added.

Meesho has been building the platform for the last one year, and has onboarded close to 3,000 regional micro entrepreneurs on its network clocking nearly a million shipments every day.

Pandey stated that up to 20 micro-entrepreneurs handle a shipment before it reaches the end consumer, emphasizing that this is the level of disaggregation that Meesho managed to achieve in its network.

Meesho has achieved a 5% reduction in cost through this network, Pandey said. “We believe we still have the runway to reduce cost by at least another 5-10% in the medium to long term.”

In terms of scale of network, Pandey said: “We have around 3000 micro-entrepreneurs on the platform. We want to take it to a 100,000 within three years.”