From reviews to mcommerce: India’s Zopper gets backing for its hyper local shopping app

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Delhi’s Zopper, a hyper local mobile marketplace, today announced it bagged US$20 million from existing investors Tiger Global and Nirvana Ventures Advisors. The company had received US$6.5 million last year. The injection of funds will be used to expand to 30 cities across India and upgrade technology systems.

Zopper allows users to shop from the nearest retail store and get the product instantly. After choosing a location, the app shows trending items and allows users to shop by category such as mobile, tablets, laptops, kitchen, and home appliances.

A user can also call the retailers directly from within the app.

At present, it features 500,000 brick-and-mortar stores from Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, with new cities joining the network soon.

“We aim to fortify our presence in the major cities of India and rope in more retailers,” says Neeraj Jain, co-founder of Zopper.

Zopper in its earlier form was called Reviews42. It started out as an app for product reviews and comparison, then pivoted to introduce features to buy instantly from both online and offline sellers.

Zopper’s pivot was an essential move. In India, several reviews, ratings, and price comparison sites have failed, including BearShop. Other players in the space, including Helion-backed MySmartPrice, moved from basic price comparison to product discovery.

PriceBaba is another price comparison search engine for brick-and-mortar stores. It operates across 11 cities including Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Baroda, and verifies more than 1,500 stores for comparison.

Zopper now competes with heavily funded ecommerce players like homegrown Flipkart and Snapdeal, as well as global ecommerce giant Amazon. Zopper is already an app-only service, which may give it a competitive edge. Flipkart is reported to have plans to shut its website and mobile site to go app only in the near future, while the Flipkart-owned Myntra has already gone app only recently.

Zopper app is currently available on Android platform and will soon be extended to iOS.