UrbanDart 2.0: Modern Commerce, Done Right!

I started UrbanDart about 3 years ago. UrbanDart’s mission is to enable sales and help businesses grow quickly by improving sales and creating new partnerships.

Today, we introduce UrbanDart 2.0, a big step for us as an organization that takes us closer to our core mission.

Why did I start UrbanDart?

I’m a computer science engineer and I was never into sales. In my previous startup, we failed to acquire customers quickly and could not scale up as planned. Sales would pull us down as a company, not because we had a bad idea/product but because we were dealing with a distribution problem at the core. I decided to dive in deeper to solve this. The idea of UrbanDart originated from this frustrating experience of discovery, reach out, and selling to SMBs to scale business by keeping costs low.

UrbanDart 1.0

I’m a believer in the quote, “Revenue solves all known problems” for a business. UrbanDart 1.0 focused on creating distribution networks for brands to tap into to quickly scale up their business and to sell their products.

During the pre-jio/pre-UPI days, most of India wasn’t digital and it required a salesperson to close a deal either on the phone or in-person to establish credibility & trust. For this, we created a marketplace model with 75,000+ feet-on-street vetted sales ambassadors across India who would work on these sales projects on a freelance basis and get paid on conversion.

Brands loved working with UrbanDart for the quality of work and also because there were no fixed costs to get started with sales. Over the years, we are proud to have worked with some of the biggest and reputed brands like Google, Amazon, Swiggy, Flipkart, Zomato, Uber, Dunzo, BharatPe with the highest customer satisfaction rate in the industry.

Over the years, I have analyzed various sales techniques, processes, tools, methodologies, training modules that are used across industries. We experimented relentlessly to build use cases & success stories to create our own sales playbook that could be applied based on the use case.

Our learnings

Most of the hyper-growth start-ups and organizations even today deploy thousands of feet on street salespeople to acquire customers and we feel there can be a better solution for distribution. Not only is feet on street sales expensive, slow but operationally intensive.

Three things jumped out of our playbook —

1. Empower businesses with tools that enable transactions & remove friction
2. Offer commerce anywhere customers are
3. Create a trusted distribution network that businesses can tap into to grow

UrbanDart 2.0 — Modern commerce, done right.

We bring together all our learnings over the years to create a new digital product.

UrbanDart focuses on empowering businesses with a white-label “commerce infrastructure” that combines superior customer experience along with efficient fulfillment technology for small & large businesses.

Urban Dart is a one-stop solution for everything commerce. Our software enables both small & large businesses to create seamless modern commerce experiences for their customers.

Going digital is no longer an option but a core necessity. In the past two years, businesses have learned new ways of doing business and found new ways to connect with their customers. We believe that businesses need to go beyond just “digital” and work towards creating a true omnichannel experience to impress the new-age tech-savvy customers. This applies to businesses across the spectrum — food, retail, groceries, jewelry, fashion, B2B, and more.

We focus on empowering businesses with technology tools to compete with new age marketplaces and bigger brands. Now with UrbanDart by their side, they have access to the same technology what big organizations have — that too at a fraction of the cost!

UrbanDart is a flexible system and can scale as a business scales. No coding, no technical expertise is required to operate. It is so simple that both customers & staff will love it.

The Omni-Channel Experience

Today’s consumers don’t just want quality products, they want them fast and to be able to get information about them quickly. Being reachable for your customers is very important. Introducing connected Omni-channel.

Omni-channel commerce is about creating a seamless experience for customers that blurs the line between online & offline shopping. It is about providing customers what they want, when and where they want it.

With Urban Dart, businesses can provide a seamless customer experience whether the customer is shopping online from a mobile device, a laptop or in a physical retail store, or on via a call. Everything is connected, the experience, the inventory, CRM, and order handling.

With UrbanDart’s SaaS software, businesses can tap into customers across various channels to make the most out of their marketing. These channels could be physical retail stores, eCommerce websites, apps, marketplaces, social media, email marketing, and everything in between. Here are few scenarios

• Buy online, ship to customer
• Buy online, pick up in-store
• Shop in-store, buy online
• Buy in-store, ship to customer
• Buy on the phone, ship to customer

This will be the new normal for customers in the post covid era.

Apart from the SaaS software that is offered to the business, UrbanDart’s fully connected digital ecosystem helps them tap into a trusted network that enables businesses to partner & grow. The result — higher revenues, lower costs.

Nearly 75% of shoppers say they use multiple channels to compare prices. A report by IDC Retail Insights found that businesses using omni-channel marketing strategies saw a 15–35% increase in average transaction size. Omni-channel customers not only spend more, they are also more loyal to your brand and also refer more to family and friends.

We spent a lot of time speaking with customers across verticals to understand the flows and the best practices. We launched our beta version in early 2021 and saw a positive response in the small and medium business segments.

What worked?

SMBs are at the cusp of digitization and realize that they need to adapt to new technologies to solve their core problems like manpower, profit margins, and business expansion.

Apart from the software, we have made the shopping experiences more special by creating custom platforms based on the business. A “generic ecommerce” platform doesn’t cut it anymore. For example, food requires speed & ease of transaction. Jewelry or fashion shopping needs guided flows with 1–1 video sessions or try-on. B2B ordering flow requires quotations, credit and escrow. The flows take into account the best industry practices and remove the small friction points that slow down your sale.

Our customers have been the guiding force behind how the software has evolved. We have taken into account the best practices of each industry. Urban Dart is loaded with features, both simple and advanced. We set up businesses for success from the very start.

We are working with some of the biggest names in the retail space who love our product.

The benefits

1. Businesses were able to create a seamless omni-channel experience for their customers with little effort.
2. Businesses were able to go digital, automate and streamline complex operations. Spend 30% less time on dealing with known issues.
3. Lesser dependency on manpower & online marketplaces/apps. Businesses on average save more than Rs.3,00,000 in commission each month.
4. Businesses were able to create a strong brand & a wow shopping experience that people would talk about & refer more customers.
5. Businesses were able to get the most of our customer data to retarget customers and create marketing campaigns.
6. Businesses could integrate into third-party applications, payment & delivery partners via APIs and build their own flows.
7. Employees hate using multiple software. UrbanDart has software that supports everything — customer shopping experience, backend fulfillment, inventory management, payments & accounting & marketing. Businesses do not have to purchase multiple software or moving data between systems.

The future is about independent businesses. UrbanDart bundles together powerful sales channels along with a suite of applications that help these businesses to build, manage, optimize & grow like never before. We are pumped about our new offering and the year ahead as we grow our team and clients.

With an amazing team in place that believes in the vision and with some of the smartest investors by our side, we are moving forward each day towards creating something our customers want & love.

We are remote-first, work from anywhere organization. We are hiring across sales, technology & operations. You can check our careers page for the list of open positions. Stay tuned as we reimagine the future of commerce.

Cheers!

Nithin Baalay, Founder