Summit Shah
Dukaan App - Empowering Small Businesses in India
Covid-19 gave way to an umpteen startups in India. One such startup is the Dukaan App, founded by Suumit Shah in 2020.
Due to the imposition of lockdown, various small and medium-sized shops across India were compelled to shut. It was the small retailers who were in dire straits. With the vision to aid small businesses to survive and can establish their presence on the internet, Summit Shah started an app that helped Indian merchants in setting up their online stores with utmost ease.
Suumit Shah has always been an avid and quick learner. He learned web design and web development from his roommate while pursuing his engineering degree and working in his uncle’s shop. He got inspired by a text from a Jockey outlet that had sent him a PDF of their catalog mentioning that orders can now be taken on WhatsApp. Shah was bemused by how the local shopkeeper was trying to sell through a platform like WhatsApp and not through his own e-commerce store. Thus the idea of Dukaan app struck his mind and Suumit along with his team – Anuraag Meena, Subhash Choudhary, and Kaustub Pandey were ready with the app in the next couple of days.
The USP of Dukaan app is its simplicity. The app enables retailers and other people with zero programming skills to set up their own e-Commerce stores in just a few minutes. It provides offline shop owners the facility to sell their products and services online as well through WhatsApp. Within 20 days of its launch, the app registered 1,50,000 stores across 400 cities and received more than 75,000 orders. Dukaan, being a complete mobile-based app has a competitive advantage as small shop owners cannot afford desktops or laptops.
One of the initial users of the app was a 60 year old man who started selling goats on the platform. The entrepreneurs saw all kinds of people, whether with goats or any kind of store be it grocery or restaurants or even Travel agencies, seamlessly coming online. The app played a significant role in empowering small businesses in India. It enabled about 2 million small and medium-sized entrepreneurs in India to start and develop their operations online.
Summit Shah’s motive to provide merchants and retailers the ease of setting up online stores can be seen through the continuous improvements made in the app. A special feature called ‘magic upload’ was recently introduced to help users list their inventories on the app. It reduced the time to upload inventory to 1/10th of their original time. Dukaan is one such Startup that made Digital India come to reality for numerous small businesses across India.