MoiPot - An online Food ecommerce Marketplace

o Krishna Shah (Co-founder & Chief of Operations and Marketing) – Did MS in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania and worked at Bank of America as a Technology Associate. She learnt business dynamics and marketing in India which helped in building the brand.

o Rushabh Shah (Co-founder & Chief of Technology and Finance) – Did MS in Computer Science from University of Florida and worked at Amazon and Synopsys as a Software Developer for a couple of years. He honed his business skills in India before starting Moipot.

While Rushabh and I were in US, we faced problem in getting Indian food items with authentic taste. The sweets and savories which we used to get there at Indian Stores missed the regional touch of Indian cities. We used to ask our family to send us parcels every few months from India and stuffed our luggage with food whenever we visited our home. We realized that we were not the only people facing this problem. Our friends back in India faced a similar issue when they moved to different parts of India due to work and missed the delicacies from their home town. This is when the idea of Moipot was born. 

We are trying to solve two problems. Lot of people migrate to different parts of India due to studies or work. Main problem is that there is no simple and easy way for people staying away from their home town to get authentic regional sweets and savories from their native place. The second problem is foodies don’t get to explore delicacies from other cities of India very easily. They get to taste those only if they travel to that place or some of their relative staying there gets it for them when they visit. This is where Moipot comes into the picture. We provide a platform for them to get and try new savouries from all over India delivered to their doorstep in a couple of clicks.

Moipot is an ecommerce marketplace where you get a variety of authentic sweets, snacks and accompaniments like pickles, mouth fresheners, etc. from different regions of India delivered to your doorstep. Customers can browse and search the website via specific product, brand or city. Once the order has been placed, we deliver the savories within 2-5 days. To ensure the freshness of the products, we pick them up from the vendor and courier directly to the customer. Thus the customer gets the savories fresh and faster. Vendors can register and start selling on our website within less than 24 hours. They can manage their products and orders through their dedicated vendor dashboard. This helps in transparency and avoids delays in operations.

We are targeting two sections of the market:

1. Every foodie is our target! To be specific, we are targeting people in the age group of 18 to 40 staying in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities of India.

2. People who stay away from their family or native place. No age limit or geographic location limit for this.

The things that set us apart are real time vendor dashboard and live chat. So, the vendor can control each and every minute detail of his entire store on the portal. It takes less than 24 hours for a vendor to register and start selling at Moipot. They needn’t set up anything from their end to maintain or keep track of activities. The dashboard is self-sufficient for all their needs. For customers, we have a live chat facility. From imparting knowledge about savories to troubleshooting technical issues, it’s a one stop instant solution for them.

It took us almost a year to launch it. We took our time in doing proper research of the idea and try to find out the feasibility. After starting the execution our major setback was choosing the wrong technology stack. 4 months into the execution of the project we realized that it was time to scrap it and start from scratch again. Meanwhile demonetization and GST worries created constant apprehensions amongst vendors making it a time consuming task for us to get them on board.

Currently, we are more into organic SEO and Social Media Marketing. In future, we plan to use Google AdWords and do on ground activities in different cities to mark our presence. We feel digital marketing is the best way forward for us considering the audience we are targeting.

It’s a pure commission model. On every order, we charge a commission to our vendors. In future, we can monetize the featured products section and generate revenue from such different small streams.

We want to bring all the popular savouries from every part of India on the portal. Moipot would be a one stop solution for all the authentic regional delicacy needs.

The eChai community has been a great support from the moment we joined. Currently, we have the website but not the apps. We would love the suggestions and recommendations from the community on how we can make the portal more user friendly. But the most important feedback we want is the community to suggest to us popular brands along with their regional sweets and savories which they would like to see on Moipot. That would help us in building the website catering to the specific needs of the people.