The SaaS platform, at present, is being used by close 5,000 Shopify stores in over 100 countries. Some of them include MPL, The Man Company, and others
Customers are being offered more than just a place to purchase products by ecommerce websites these days. The websites offer features that will make customers want to come back for more, as per YourStory.
As per YourStory, Gunjankumar Patel and Milind Patel founded Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform Flits in 2017 for enhancing customers’ pre and post-purchase experience. Solutions such as customer account page, rewards program, social logins, wishlist, integrations, and customisation are being offered to businesses that use Shopify by the Ahmedabad-based SaaS start-up.
The SaaS start-up, with the ecommerce industry booming, provides customers with an account page where they can see all the data in an organised way like their profile, store credits, wishlist, and order history, recently viewed products, delivery address, store credit, and other rewards program.
“We are improving customer returns for a long run value,” says Gunjan. “We are not like the direct marketing features, but indirectly we are keeping the customer base. We are adding value to customer data for merchants.”
The SaaS platform, at present, is being used by close 5,000 Shopify stores in over 100 countries. Some of them include MPL, The Man Company, and others.
“Players like Amazon, Flipkart, and many others provide these experiences in a very organised way, but Shopify did not have the same facility. Hence, we came up with this idea,” Gunjan tells YourStory.
This is not the first venture started by the school friends turned co-founders. They first started an online kite-selling platform called GMODI.com (Gunjan-Milind online distributor) during their college days.
“Milind and I wanted to start a business of our own. This led us to start the kite business. But after that, our families wanted us to find a job,” shares Gunjan.
Milind and Gunjan then joined Lucent Innovations. Later, they started a service-based company called eFANTOM, where they built customer applications based on the needs of their clients.
Using this experience and understanding of the market needs, the founding team started to work on the SaaS start-up Flits.
“After a lot of analysis and R&D, we came up with this idea and started working on it, and we launched the first phase in December 2017,” says Gunjan.
In the first month, the SaaS start-up on-boarded three clients from the USA and India, earning Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) of $28 in the beginning.
With a 15-member team, the SaaS start-up now has an MRR of $15,000, and recorded $700,000 in ARR for FY22.
The challenges
As per YourStory, Gunjan, while speaking about challenges, says, the biggest challenge the SaaS Company faced was a lack of product awareness.
“Because we are the first customer account page related app in the ecosystem, we needed to highlight to the client about the key advantage point as it’s not a direct marketing feature, but it improves customer retention,” he says.
The problem that the SaaS start-up chose to solve was a very minuscule part, which was always ignored. Solving something new meant more questions and more wariness among the customers.
Gunjans says they had to work a lot on building trust, but after they were able to gain some customers, the customer feedback helped the SaaS firm reach the point where it is now.
Finance was the second challenge. Flits have not risen any funding as it is a bootstrapped start-up. This allowed the company to be frugal with its expenses and it invested mostly in technology building, and depended on word of mouth for marketing.
Client stories
As per YourStory and according to Gunjan, the SaaS start-up has helped its clients with an average of over 75 per cent increase in revenue and customer retention.
For instance, in one of the case studies published by the SaaS start-up, it said The Man Company increased its orders by 41 per cent using store credits. The company had reached out to Flits when it was working to enhance its customer experience by categorising its customers based on their interaction with the brand, to gamify their rewards, and loyalty program. But at the same time, it wanted to bring all the customer data to a single dashboard.
The company was finding it difficult as it could not withdraw store credits after a cancellation. By setting up a tiered rewards program (a gold customer would get a 15 per cent reward while a silver customer will receive a 10 per cent and revoking of store credits in case of cancellation), the SaaS start-up helped the company solve this issue. This led to a 91 per cent increase in average order value with store credit.
Flits works on a subscription model with three plans—Basic, Business, and Enterprise. Its charges start from $5 per month. Currently, the SaaS start-up gets its revenue from Shopify customers. In the coming months, it has plans to launch similar software for ecommerce industry.
The market and plans ahead
As per YourStory, 81 per cent of customers are more likely to be loyal to a brand that offers a customer loyalty program, a 2016 report by Canada-based Bond Brand Loyalty, in collaboration with Visa shows.
“As per current ecommerce market, we can expand our software in many directions, which will add value to the customer,” says Gunjan. “We would like to add innovation, which adds value to customer experience as an end user for Tier II, Tier III, as well as rural areas.”
To build software for the ecommerce industry and launch it by 2023 is in the current plans of the SaaS start-up. For business owners to manage their online and offline (retail) stores through Flits software, it has also integrated with a few PoS systems. With this, the owner can have a single point of data storage instead of individual data.
“We are planning for a standalone product so that we can provide our software to other businesses apart from Shopify,” shares Gunjan.
Globally, the SaaS start-up competes with Growave, Smile.io, and Yotpo to name a few, as per YourStory.
Also read: I was considered to be an expert in technology and solving problems
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