DealShare Unicorn

Founder and CEO Vineet Rao said: "Even today, 80% to 90% of items we sell are locally produced."

DealShare is described as a multi-category ecommerce marketplace offering a wide variety of products like grocery, home appliances, clothes, and food and beverages.

WestBridge co-founder Sandeep Singhal said the majority of India's population resides in non-metros, framing DealShare's target market.

DealShare delivers to Rajasthan, West Bengal, Delhi & NCR, and Uttar Pradesh per its own site, reflecting its non-metro geographic focus.

DealShare runs WhatsApp groups with customers where the company's own top management, including its founders, act as group admins to gather direct, ongoing feedback.

DealShare built game-like features into its app -- including Ludo, a 'Mahamela' event, an IPL-linked cricket quiz called DPL, and a horoscopes feature -- to keep shoppers engaged; the company says customers open the app for over 15 minutes a day on average.

Customers can become a 'DealShare Dost' and earn cash incentives every time people they refer place an order, turning regular shoppers into a paid word-of-mouth sales channel; the company says some participants earn up to Rs 30,000 a month.

Product categories (Grocery, Snacks & Beverages, Cleaning & Home Care, Personal Care, Home, Electronics, Fashion, Stationery & Toys, Dairy/Frozen/Bakery, Fruits & Veggies) are sold via the DealShare app and website.

DealShare's own site states delivery coverage: "We Deliver To Rajasthan West Bengal Delhi & NCR Uttar Pradesh."

A core operating activity is procuring through local and regional suppliers or directly from farms to lower input costs, rather than routing purchases through large national distributors.

DealShare manufactures its own private-brand lines -- Chemko, Swaccha, Sampoorti, and X One -- in collaboration with small and medium enterprise manufacturers, part of a first-phase rollout across 52 categories.

Rather than stocking an exhaustive catalog, DealShare runs a deal-by-deal model: it aggregates customer demand around a specially curated, limited assortment to negotiate better prices from suppliers.

DealShare's core distribution asset is a network of over 2,500 micro-entrepreneurs across India, called 'DealShare Dost,' who generate local demand and carry out deliveries.

DealShare sources through a network of more than 1,000 suppliers, leaning on local/regional manufacturers and direct-from-farm relationships rather than large national distributors.

DealShare owns private brands -- Chemko (home cleaning), Swaccha (personal hygiene), Sampoorti (pantry staples), and X One (male grooming) -- spanning 52 product categories in their first phase, giving it margin and shelf control beyond third-party brands.

Founder and CEO Vineet Rao said 80% to 90% of items DealShare sells are locally produced, indicating reliance on local/regional supplier partnerships.

DealShare's core revenue stream is direct retail sale of grocery and household products -- snacks & drinks, fruits & vegetables, personal care -- which grew more than 8x to Rs 1,926 crore in FY22 from Rs 236 crore in FY21.

A smaller, secondary revenue line is fees charged to vendors and brands for marketing and promotional placement on the platform, booked as 'sale of services' -- Rs 6.92 crore in FY22.

Gross revenue from operations fell to Rs 499 crore in FY24 from Rs 1,963 crore in FY23, as both the traded-goods and marketing-services revenue lines shrank while the company deliberately scaled back its footprint.

Procuring goods for resale was DealShare's single largest cost line in FY23 at Rs 2,079.9 crore, roughly 81% of its total FY23 expenditure of Rs 2,557.6 crore.

Employee benefit expenses rose 85% year-on-year to Rs 219.2 crore in FY23, including Rs 58.7 crore of ESOP cost, as the company scaled up staff.

As DealShare pulled back operations, cost of material remained its biggest expense line at Rs 529.3 crore in FY24, out of total expenses of Rs 768.18 crore.

Even after slashing overall costs, DealShare's unit economics stayed loss-making: it spent about Rs 1.54 in total cost for every rupee of revenue in FY24, worse than the Rs 1.3 it spent per rupee in FY23.