Shopclues lays off 45-50 employees across business verticals

Gurugram-based ecommerce player Shopclues has laid off around 45-50 employees across business segments. The layoffs are reportedly mostly from the marketing and operations departments.

A company spokesperson confirmed the development on Twitter, where the news first broke.

An anonymous Twitter handle by the name of Corporate PSU Bank Kumar first tweeted the development on Twitter.

Responding to Corporate PSU Bank Kumar’s tweet, Sayatan Sinha, head of corporate communication at Shopclues confirmed the same.

“Unfortunate as it might be, the rigours of a merit-based system requires that we keep the bar high on individual performance. As we wrap up the review cycle for FY 2018, this decision has impacted less than 4% of the total workforce,” he tweeted.

This comes after the ecommerce player saw two top level exits this month. According to a BusinessLine report dated March 15, Nitin Kochhar, Senior Vice-President for Categories and Marketplace, and Raunak Raheja, Director of Category Management, quit Shopclues.

At the time, a ShopClues spokesperson told HBL that Nitin decided to move out of ecommerce while Raunak moved out of the city for family reasons.

Nitin reportedly has joined logistics start-up Rivigo, while Raheja is likely to join Flipkart in Mumbai.

As the ecommerce battle in India rages on, large players such as Flipkart and Amazon have been growing aggressively, thanks to their deep pockets. While Amazon has committed $5 billion to India, while Flipkrt raised a massive round of $2 billion led by Softbank.

Interestingly, Shopclues too, raised $1 million bridge funding from Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures last month.

Shopclues seems to be stuck between the Flipkart-Amazon battle, which has taken a toll on its growth. The ecommerce marketplace’s revenues reportedly grew only 5% in 2017 as against a two-fold jump the previous year.

However, Shopclues is continuing its growth strategy and rejigged its product categories to stay put in the market. It is also betting big on private labels, especially for its fashion, home needs and furniture categories.

It was also planning to go the IPO route in a year or two, however, there has been no concrete communication on the same from the company.