Before Emberoot, our founder Sarang Kasar co-founded Olo Junction, a multi-vendor Shopify store that helped Self-Help Groups (Bachat Gats) in India sell their products online for the first time. It later became Buzitto.
- Organisation: Olo Junction, a partnership firm (later Buzitto Services Pvt Ltd)
- Role: Co-founder, February to September 2021
- Platform: Shopify with a multi-vendor marketplace app
- Services used: E-commerce, Strategy
The challenge
Self-Help Groups make food and household products but rarely sell beyond their own area. They needed a shop they could sell through, help with photographs, prices, packaging and listings, and a way to see their sales so they could plan their marketing. Each group also had to be set up as a seller, with the checks and tax handling that involves.
What Sarang did
- Met the groups, listened to their problems and helped them start using the tools, sharing why packaging, pricing and marketing matter when selling online.
- Built the Shopify store, trying several themes and templates and writing code where the theme fell short.
- Added a multi-vendor system so each group sold under its own seller account, then adapted it to Indian tax rules and set up seller KYC checks.
- Helped the groups photograph, price and list their products.
- Negotiated flat-rate courier agreements that cut rural shipping charges by 15%.
- Tested two multi-vendor apps and compared what each could and could not do.
The result
- 25 Self-Help Groups made their first online sales.
- More than 500 products listed.
- Rural shipping charges 15% lower.
The work also showed the limits of the model: keeping food quality and packaging consistent across many small groups took more coordination than the team could give. To raise funding the founders registered a private limited company, and the business continued as Buzitto.