Indian food delivery and quick commerce startup Swiggy is pivoting one of its small businesses: Swiggy Minis, a Shopify alternative for small businesses, is turning into a linkedinbio service that will now also cater to service providers such as nutritionists and fitness trainers.
In its new avatar, Swiggy Minis will act as landing pages where merchants can drive target customers from their social media pages.The company said it will soon add integration with Google Calendar to enable service providers to use the booking module.
Swiggy launched Minis as an experiment in 2022 to provide small merchants with a no-code alternative to Shopify. It allowed merchants to create a site, upload their catalogue, and manage orders, deliveries, and transactions without paying any commission. Swiggy offered a sort of discoverable marketplace on its app where end users could search for these stores.
With this revamp, the startup is removing the search layer from Minis, so customers can still see the stores they've saved and where they've ordered from in the past.
The company doesn’t take any commission from sellers and allows them to set up pages with multiple social links and theme support.
Image credit: Swiggy
Swiggy said it has revamped its Mini homepage to focus on repeat purchases.
“As a SaaS platform, Minis' primary goal is to enable merchants to quickly create an operational website. We have observed strong traction coming from merchants' social media pages and hence we have decided to prioritise this channel for discovery,” a Swiggy spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The company added that it is expanding its services beyond physical products to cater to digital offerings from various service providers. Besides integrating Google Calendar, it is also adding Google Reviews as a rating system for these service providers.
Swiggy said it has informed merchants that the shop discovery layer will go away, and merchants who were relying on Swiggy's Minis discovery mechanism to reach customers will have to promote their shops elsewhere.
However, an email newsletter to merchants reviewed by TechCrunch claims that only 5% to 10% of customers visit a merchant's store page directly through Swiggy Mini.
The company claims that even without a discovery layer, Swiggy Minis delivers better conversion rates than other platforms. Additionally, Swiggy says that merchants can expect more repeat business because customers can view their past orders and favorite merchants in the Minis section.
Other link-in-bio services like Linktree offer both preorders and storefronts, and Patreon has also added tools that allow fans to support their favorite creators in a variety of ways.
Swiggy, which plans to raise $1.25 billion through its India initial public offering, has focused in recent years on expanding its quick-commerce platform, Instamart, where it competes with food-delivery rival Zomato (which owns BlinkIt) and Lightspeed-backed unicorn Zepto.
While BlinkIt and Zepto both partner with brands to sell and promote their products on their platforms, they don’t have SaaS products for smaller sellers or creators.