Zoho launches e-commerce seller app ‘Vikra’ targeted at MSMEs on ONDC marketplace

Weeks after making a foray into the B2B payments space, Chennai-based SAAS company Zoho Corp has widened its product portfolio a few degrees more. The company has entered the ONDC marketplace with its new e-commerce seller app, Vikra.

Noting that MSMEs occupy a minuscule presence on existing e-commerce platforms due to heavy commissions, complexities in using technology, and operational challenges, Zoho has claimed that Vikra would enable “frictionless commerce across India” on the ONDC network.

In a chat with CNBC-TV18, the company’s Co-Founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu said that Vikra has the potential to be a game-changer in e-commerce, much like UPI was to digital payments: “Vikra can lower costs for smaller sellers in e-commerce just like UPI lowered costs in digital payments.”

Vembu believes Vikra has all the right ingredients for a rapid scale-up in customer acquisition, especially given the existing customers of apps like Zoho Books. “We see merchants in Zoho’s existing ecosystem getting onto ONDC and selling,” he said.

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“It helps us acquire more customers too, and as our volumes grow, we will be in a position to spread our costs out more and further lower costs for customers.” He added: “With Vikra, we see ourselves acquiring millions of customers over the next three to four years.”

More significantly, Vikra’s launch comes just weeks after Zoho unveiled its first-ever payments platform, Zoho Payments, at the Global Fintech Festival. The launch of Zoho Payments will see the Tamil Nadu tech company take on the likes of BillDesk, Razorpay, and other more established names in the B2B digital payments space.

While acknowledging that Zoho may have been a bit late to the fintech party, Sridhar maintained that the intention behind lowering the cost of making seamless digital payments still held good.

“Our focus is to enable business-to-business payments via UPI, and thereby lower the cost of doing this and securing it,” he said. “You have UPI’s KYC feature, all of the security that comes with it—and all of this comes into Zoho Payments now.” While Zoho has not ruled out a foray into the consumer payments space, Vembu said it was still early days to discuss the venture.

For Zoho Corp, the launch of Zoho Payments and Vikra within a few weeks of each other holds enormous significance from a go-to-market standpoint. “Our differentiator is that we now have an end-to-end stack of products,” Sridhar pointed out. “Our stack integrates with banking, finance, inventory, and now a seller-side app, while our competitors focus on one thing or another.”