“Heyhomie offers homepreneurs a full stack e-commerce platform on Whatsapp”

Anujj Mehta (founder HeyHomie) is one of the early entrepreneurs to leverage the business feature of WhatsApp as a platform including its payment solutions on UP and Payment Gateway

What triggered the thought of using WhatsApp Business Messaging

WhatsApp is the most widely used chat applications by Indians. Interestingly, a good majority of businesses that are started or run from home (Homepreneurs) are using WhatsApp as their primary tool for lead generation and sales channel. Having said that, WhatsApp isn’t offering any in-app ecommerce functionality for its users as a default functionality, and this leaves them to look out for other ecommerce tools available in the market which are either web or app based.

Interestingly, homepreneurs are not very comfortable with using web / app-based ecommerce tools because it requires them to hire a professional agency to manage these online stores and the expensive signup cost along with recurring charges to manage the stores on an ongoing basis is a deterrent for them.

Those who still manage to get their website are struggling to convert sales on their website as there is limited scope to manage native customer retargeting, build abandoned cart recoveries, create referral programs for their customers, build communities, lower their CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and likewise are some of the critical points which any homepreneur would require to grow their business, but unfortunately they can’t do it today because either such features are way too expensive or they don’t have an understanding of who to hire or how to execute the same . And all this may be available via a website/ app, but then at what cost and is it viable?

At HeyHomie we have worked towards addressing this void via our Social Commerce SaaS Platform that operates on WhatsApp & Instagram; ours is a full stack offering, i.e. from an E-commerce store till last mile delivery along with exhaustive customer life cycle management for building higher LTV and data sets to retarget them.

This means now any homepreneur can either start their entrepreneurial journey from the comfort of home or scale their existing home business by setting up their stores on WhatsApp & Instagram via HeyHomie’s channel. We used the Official WhatsApp Business APIs to build this.

What was the benefit you saw by using WhatsApp Business Messaging

Building our SaaS product around WhatsApp was an absolute no brainer for us. The reasons were quite simple

•             The majority of our customers (sellers) and their respective customers (buyers) are on WhatsApp

•             Moving them out of WhatsApp and building a journey on web/ app stores is a challenging task

•             Coexisting within the WhatsApp ecosystem was the best bet as our sellers/customers and their respective buyers/customers don’t have to change their behavior with respect to communicating with their buyers/customers or even while accepting orders or shipping them. WhatsApp is the deafult app they use for all business or communication purposes

•             We wanted to leverage the power of WhatsApp Groups, which inheritly is the default go to market strategy for most homepreneurs

•             WhatsApp is a true quick commerce experience and that’s exactly what our sellers/ customers have been looking for. Leveraging on WhatsApp’s ecosystem allows us to bypass the need to build UI/ UX efficiances at our end.

How has the response from your customers been

Since our launch in Feb 2022, we have pivoted 3 times and these pivots happened because of the customer feedback we received. We have been very receptive to the feedback received from our beta users as it allowed us to understand what it takes for us to make them (our customers) successful.

We started as a Marketplace but with pivots in place, we’re now a SaaS Company offering WhatsApp & Instagram QR Shops (Social Commerce) to Homepreneurs & select Brands.

Who is the typical customer for HeyHomie

Our key customers are Homepreneurs and they can be categorised in the following manner

•             Creators Ecosystem

•             HomeChefs

•             Jewellery Sellers

•             Clothing Sellers

•             Packaged Products

How did the WhatsApp UPI and Payment Gateway help you.

Yes, so we are amongst the first few platforms to offer native WhatsApp Pay (UPI) feature to our customers. In this way, our customers can now have the ease of collecting payments within WhatsApp itself, i.e. without moving their customers to an external browser. For all Non UPI Payments, we’re using other payment gateways.

How have you seen your own growth on account of this

At the launch, we witnessed a significant surge in seller registrations, and we were quite successful in onboarding our sellers, but as we pivoted, we had to make some hard decisions about moving our platform from public access to beta users access only.

The Beta Program actually helped us in making the product simple, efficient & blazing fast. We’re still running our Beta Program and are expected to make the product open to the public by early Jan 2023 (via Waitlist Program). Under the beta program, we have a little over 500+ sellers who have either setup their stores on WhatsApp or Instagram.

We will soon launch the Waitlist Program for public users, where they can sign up and get the chance to setup their own stores on WhatsApp & Instagram for FREE!

Apart from this, we provide all our sellers with WhatsApp and Instagram QR Codes, Shop & Product URLs and extensive insight on how they use these stores with their existing Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Youtube and other social accounts. We don’t charge our customers for any conversational message pricing for WhatsApp, which is actually charged by Facebook to us. We only charge our sellers when they sell. Our pricing is built on the ideology of Pay As You Go.

Anujj Mehta

Founder, HeyHomie

feedbackvnd@cybermedia.co.in