Parinay Itkan, Founder & COO, Shyplite, talks about how Shyplite is aggressively evolving to deliver global growth potential to businesses with robust technology, innovation, and end to end shipping services.
How is Shyplite poised to transform logistics and how do you view technology aiding the logistics landscape?
Before walking you through how Shyplite is forging towards excellence with technology, I think it is crucial to understand the genesis behind the birth of Shyplite. In 2015, we, a bunch of E-commerce enthusiasts – Sugam, Nisschal, and I, huddled together on how to solve limitations faced by modern businesses arising out of unorganized delivery management, having tackled several such pain points being sellers ourselves. It was the idea behind solving this problem that gave birth to Shyplite. Shyplite, this brand name, was conceptualized keeping in mind the simplicity element that we are trying to imbibe in the complexity of shipping and logistics. And thereafter, vigorously transforming the Business Logistics landscape with intelligent automation and innovation!
Technology has already changed how SMBs conduct their business today. The SMBs have adapted to these technological changes faster than larger and traditional companies. Businesses have gone from local to national and now aims to go global aided by technology. In e-commerce logistics, we are witnessing a high demand for warehousing and fulfilment, returns reduction tools and shipping through retail outlets. Hyperlocal deliveries, which used to be a struggling segment, are now a thriving industry. Hence, we at Shyplite are aggressively evolving to deliver global growth potential to businesses with robust technology, innovation, and end to end shipping services.
What are the USPs that makes it stand apart from its peers?
We are India’s first and only 360-degree 4th party LPaaS [Logistics Platform as a Service], an end-to-end single shipping gateway empowering Shyppers with a tightly wired network of the most robust, secure, and cost-effective logistics infrastructure to enable businesses of all sizes to seamlessly expand their reach to every corner of the world possible, overcoming all the barriers of shipping. We have established ourselves on the 4 powerful Customer-Centric forces of Performance, Processes, Innovations and Technology to give business’ logistics a seamless and successful flight.
One biggest reason why we have emerged as the most trusted shipping gateway to Tens of thousands of businesses in India is that we listen and care for our clients with a dedicated support team in place. Manifesting an excellent delivery experience to their customers remains the cornerstone of all that we do at Shyplite. We find our success in enabling their business towards limitless expansion and helping them delight their customers every single day.
How did this business idea strike you?
In 2015, when Sugam and I were both scaling our own e-commerce businesses, we both could not grow and foster at an expected pace as all our time went into managing multiple courier partners and then the complete tedious logistics management. This is where we realized a gap in business logistics in India and the only available resolution in the market were online aggregators. Now it’s been half a decade to the day when Sugam, Nisschal, and I together dwelled upon a solution for all the e-commerce sellers in India and conceptualized the idea for Shyplite – a single shipping gateway for logistics automation and end-to-end management.
Years 2020-21 have been one of the most exceptional years for businesses. What was your game plan? How did you enable your customers in ensuring seamless business?
In this drastically transforming business' ecosystem, mountains need to be moved and a lot needs to be done by all the Indian Logistics and shipping companies as well as marketplaces to survive and enable the homegrown D2C brands and help make an impact on the global e-commerce landscape. The Covid pandemic in 2020 brought new challenges for us and in fact, the whole supply chain and retail industry with a shift to increased online businesses.
In these times of crisis, Shyplite is on a hyper-growth trajectory, and we remember our struggle to stay buoyant, coordinating operations in the middle of containment zones and movement restrictions. Adapting to a work-from-home model and recovering to business-as-usual as the e-commerce industry found its feet in the post-pandemic world was really demanding. The business certainly surged in size and revenue during this period. The recovery from the pandemic was quick for online businesses. Work from the office is still a hybrid model for us, based on the project-to-project requirements with complete safety and sanitization norms followed. In fact, during the pandemic, we are proud to share that pertaining to our core values and a strong focus on employee welfare, there were zero layoffs and pay cuts in our organization. Unlimited paid leaves were given to those who were suffering or recovering from COVID or could not attend work due to attention needed by their family in similar circumstances.
How is the logistics space for Indian start-ups in terms of making a mark in this highly diverse industry vertical? Did you face any initial hiccups and how did you overcome them?
Logistics requirements for all the e-commerce retail sectors are getting reshaped with automation and fulfilment for continuously evolving business demands and cross-borders expansion. With increasing demand from tier 2 and tier 3 cities, finding the right target audience, reaching out to them with the right content strategies, ensuring quicker deliveries, managing and predicting returns, reporting and inventory management, cross-border logistics, ensuring customer loyalty are some areas where most innovations are going to happen.
Therefore, our strategy is simply to equip our customers with the best technology and features that increase their global growth potential. We are aggressively evolving our cross-border services and soon launching our disruptive cross-border service to serve the growing need of Indian Merchants.
What are the innovative or game changing initiatives that Shyplite has taken in the recent past?
At every level of shipping that you do on our LPaaS Shyplite, AI has a role to play. Like: there is an API to handle the creation of the order on the logistic partners' platform, another that prints shipping labels, another for AWB (airway bill) generation, and then for assigning a delivery agent to pick up the order. Even the NDR process is completely automated with a real-time tracking system. Advanced methods, such as geocoding and location intelligence are being used for optimum performance, and there's much more to it. As technology continues to advance, we will continue to innovate, finding the best uses for it that can improve our sellers' logistics.
What are your future plans in place?
We have become India's fastest-growing logistics player trusted by 90,000+ sellers and are on track to surpass 1 million shipments per month. Currently operating as a team of 160+, we're planning to hire an additional 140+ people in the next 1 next year to support our expansion drive. To drive growth and product innovation and build product portfolio, Shyplite is actively investing in technology-based logistics ancillary companies.
Technology and supply chain needs to go hand in hand to provide a cost-efficient solution to the growing digitization, same day deliveries and cross-border shipping needs. Backed by recently raised growth capital, we are evolving and upgrading into India’s first 360 Degree 4th Party LPaaS providing end-to-end shipping solutions. Making sure our sellers and the consumers get an amplified shipping and delivery experience with our enhanced processes, a wider spectrum of services and more powerful design. We are also launching our disruptive cross-border service, to serve the growing cross-border shipping needs of Indian Merchants and D2C brands.
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