Business Pivots: Tradus Becomes Online Grocery Store, Yahoo SmallBusiness Becomes Yahoo Store
Pivot has varied meanings, but when it comes to businesses and startups, it generally means change in the direction where the company or product is headed. A scientific definition of Pivot is, “structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth.”
Pivots can happen at any stage of business, but in most cases, it happens when something is not working out as expected. That seems to be exact case of Tradus, Naspers backed online marketplace in India. Another pivot is happening at with Yahoo Small Business section.
Let us look at each of these pivots:
Tradus Becomes Full Fledged Online Grocery-Only Store
Tradus, till now was a marketplace that featured thousands (if not millions) of products from hundreds of vendors. While they have operated the marketplace model for over 3 years, it seems that the business has not progresses as expected.
Rather than staying the course and taking on likes of Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal head-on, Tradus have pivoted into a Grocery-only platform. Operating a marketplace model needs resources (aka $$$) and that too in millions billions of dollars as is very visible from funding raised by Flipkart or investment commitment from Amazon.
Online Groceries is a great model, if local logistics could be worked out well. Currently, they have opened online groceries in 3 cities including Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.
Tradus had started doing online groceries a few months back, but still had other products listed. However, now they seem to have removed all other categories and only have categories like dairy, fruits, poultry, sweets, groceries, dry fruits and beverages.
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Yahoo Replaces Small Business into Yahoo Stores
Yahoo Small Business has been one of the oldest vertical of Yahoo which dealt with domain name registrations, website hosting among other things. However, it seem to have run its course and has now pivoted into Yahoo Stores, an eCommerce platform that will help anyone start, build and grow a successful business online.
Yahoo Stores is essentially a SAAS offering that has been built based on what they have learned from their small business customers over past 16 years. With Yahoo stores, small businesses can setup online stores in matter of minutes.
Some of the Yahoo Stores Features include
- Automatic Search Engine Optimization
- Use of same technology as Yahoo.com
- Readymade beautiful templates and themes
- Easy to use interface
- Powerful product catalog schema and tools
- Design Customizations
- Mobile optimized stores
- Real-time analytics for web and mobile
- Seamless PCI compliant payment processing experience
Check out their introductory video
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