Snapdeal pilots expansion of home-services category in four cities

The current model lists out services from a handful of vendors across carpentry, plumbing, pest control and installation services.

Payal Ganguly
  • Published On Feb 3, 2016 at 07:37 AM IST
HYDERABAD: As customer experience becomes the buzz-word to ensure loyalty, online marketplaces are leaving no stone unturned for a 360-degree experience.

Amazon set the ball rolling by investing in on-demand services aggregator Housejoy in December 2015 for its installation services and now Alibaba and SoftBankbacked Snapdeal is expanding its home-services category in a pilot across four cities.

“We are currently running a pilot across four cities — Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai and Pune for the last 40 days. Home-services is an interesting space and we will decide on the business model which works best for us,” said Rahul Taneja, VP of category management at Snapdeal.

The current model lists out services from a handful of vendors across carpentry, plumbing, pest control and installation services.

The on-demand services space saw large investments last year including Rs 165-crore round for services aggregator UrbanClap led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Online marketplaces including Snapdeal and Paytm as well as online classifieds site Quikr have been actively evaluating companies in the home-services space for acquisition, confirmed a company which received interest from the three players for acqui-hire.

“They (the marketplaces) are looking at acqui-hiring companies which work with professionals on their roll as well as online classifieds,” said the founder of the company on condition of anonymity.

Online classifieds companies Sulekha and JustDial have also re-invented themselves to provide appbased on-demand services for better discovery of businesses listed with them. The current focus on home services by Snapdeal is targeted mainly at installation of products bought on the marketplace.

Unitus Seed Fund backed facility management firm Jack On Block is among the four service providers listed on Snapdeal’s home services category page.
  • Published On Feb 3, 2016 at 07:37 AM IST
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