Services marketplaces are the next big opportunity

Close on the heels of its acquisition of Sendd, a marketplace for logistics services, craftsvilla.com has announced its acqui-hire of F2SO4.

F2SO4 offers sizing and fitting services and is a services marketplace with other offerings such as garment rentals.

Manoj Gupta, co-founder and CEO, craftsvilla.com is bullish about this move.

“Many services marketplaces will emerge between 2016- 2020. These could include something as basic as tailoring to as advanced as wedding planners. We see stitching as an important peripheral ethnic service for our customer experience and we see lot of post purchase demand around this from our customers. F2SO4’s sizing and fitting service was a big draw for us to acquire them.”

One interesting aspect of the collaboration is that F2SO4 can continue working as an standalone stitching platform which other ecommerce companies can also use in future.

The founder of F2SO4, Amrit Singh, a Delhi-based IIT alumnus, who self-confessedly says they are the geeks who have cracked the algorithm to finally achieve an infinite wardrobe on a budget adds, “ We are the generation who likes to experiment. At F2SO4 we always dreamed of becoming agents who enabled experimentation and rich experiences, and I am glad we are realising our vision with our customised sizing and fitting solutions.”

F2SO4 was founded as a apparel-as-a-service platform by Amrit Singh and Sachin Goel, batchmates from IIT Delhi, and Partik Bhuchar, a young charming businessman. Envisioned as a technology company which solves the fashion-problem, they approached every problem with a technological solution. This process naturally led them to put their efforts towards solving the sticky sizing-problem of e-commerce. The result of this was a pair of sophisticated and user friendly applications that caught the attention of Craftsvilla management.

Manoj added that “with the comfort levels that people do have on transacting through apps, I see services-fulfilment via app growing tremendously over the next 5 year horizon. Also, at 50% women sellers, Craftsvilla.com has the highest number of women vendors in Indian e-commerce. We hope to aggregate many more homegrown women entrepreneurs into the fold through this service.”

Services marketplaces are of course hyperlocal in nature and could also lead to listings on aggregator service marketplaces. This could provide an impetus to grassroots entrepreneurship.