Flits, based in Ahmedabad, provides services including customer account pages, reward programmers, social logins, and wish lists to businesses and merchants utilizing Shopify.
Nowadays, e-commerce websites provide users with more than simply a platform to make purchases. They provide elements that will entice customers to return again and again.
In order to improve the pre- and post-purchase experiences of clients, Gunjan Kumar Patel and Milind Patel founded the SaaS platform Flits in 2017.
The Ahmedabad-based startup provides Shopify-using companies with services like customer account pages, rewards programmers, social logins, wish lists, integrations, and customization.
Due to the rapid growth of the e-commerce sector, Flits offers its customers an account page where they can view all of their information in an organized manner, including their profile, store credits, Wishlist, order history, recently viewed products, delivery address, store credit, and other rewards programmers.
According to Gunjan, “We are enhancing consumer returns for long-term value.” “We don’t use direct marketing techniques, but by using other means, we maintain our consumer base. For retailers, we are enhancing the value of customer data.
Nearly 5,000 Shopify stores are currently using the platform in more than 100 countries.
MPL, The Man Company, and others are a few of them.
How was it started?
Shopify lacked the same facility as competitors like Amazon, Flipkart, and many more who offer similar experiences in a very organized manner. Therefore, we thought of this,” Gunjan tells Your Story.
The former school classmates turned co-founders had launched other businesses in the past.
During their college years, they founded GMODI.com (Gunjan-Milind online distributor), an online kite-selling platform.
“Milind and I desired to launch our own company.
This inspired us to launch our kite company.
However, our families then requested that we find employment, recalls Gunjan.
After that, Milind and Gunjan joined Lucent Innovations. Later, they founded Fantom, a service-based business, where they created client-specific customer applications.
The founding team of Flits began developing the product using their knowledge of the market and experience.
“We came up with this idea and started working on it after a lot of study and R&D, and we launched the first phase in December 2017,” explains Gunjan.
Three new customers from the USA and India were onboarded by the firm in the first month, which resulted in an initial Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) of $28. 1196625.00
The firm now has a 15-person team, 1196625.00 MRR, and 55842500.00 in ARR for FY22.
The challenges
Speaking of difficulties, Gunjan claims that the lack of customer awareness of the company’s products was its major problem.
Because we are the only customer account page-related software in the ecosystem, we had to emphasize to the client the major benefit since it doesn’t involve direct marketing but rather increases customer retention, according to the author.
Flits chose to address a tiny portion of the issue that was consistently disregarded. When a problem was fresh, customers had more questions and were more cautious.
Gunjan’s claims that although they put in a lot of effort to earn consumers, it was the customers’ input that allowed the business to advance to where it is today.
The second difficulty was financial. Flits is a self-funded startup that relies only on its savings. Because of this, the business was able to keep costs down, invest heavily in technology development, and rely on word-of-mouth advertising for promotion.
Client stories
Gunjan claims that the business has assisted its clients in increasing revenue and retaining customers by an average of more than 75%.
For instance, The Man Company raised their orders by 41% utilizing shop credits, according to one of the case studies provided by Flits.
When the business wanted to improve its customer experience by segmenting its customers based on how they interacted with the brand and gamify its rewards and loyalty programmer, it contacted Flits.
However, it also sought to consolidate all client data into a single dashboard.
Since it was unable to withdraw store credits after a cancellation, the business was having trouble.
By establishing a tiered incentives programmer, Flits assisted the business in resolving this problem (a gold customer would get a 15 percent reward while a silver customer would receive a 10 percent and revoking of store credits in case of cancellation.)
As a result, the average order value with store credit increased by 91%.
There are three subscription-based options offered by Flits: Basic, Business, and Enterprise. Its monthly fees begin at $5. Customers of Shopify are currently the startup’s main source of income. In the upcoming months, it intends to introduce a comparable piece of software for the e-commerce sector.
The market and plans ahead
According to a 2016 study conducted in partnership with Visa by the Canadian company Bond Brand Loyalty, 81 percent of consumers are more likely to stick with a company that has a customer loyalty programmer.
According to the present e-commerce business, Gunjan believes, “We can extend our software in numerous directions, adding value for the customer.” We would like to include innovation because it improves the end user experience for Tier II, Tier III, and rural locations.
The business will now develop software for the e-commerce sector and release it by 2023.
Additionally, it has been connected with a few Pos platforms so that business owners can use Flits software to manage both their online and physical (retail) establishments.
Instead of having individual data, the owner can now have a single point of data storage.
According to Gunjan, “We’re working on a separate product so that we can sell our software to companies other than Shopify.” The firm faces competition from a number of companies, including Graeve, Smile.io, and Yapo.
