With 91 crore orders in 2022, Meesho sees YoY growth of 135%

The numbers are pretty impressive: 148 sarees per minute, 93,000 T-shirts, 51,725 Bluetooth earphones and 21,662 lipsticks every day—these were Meesho’s hot-selling items in 2022, said the social commerce startup. Further, Meesho clocked 91 crore orders this year, a growth of 135 percent from a year earlier.

The company in a statement also said that it has about 140 million annual transacting users with the highest number of orders per shopper being from Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This was followed by Ladakh and the northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim.

Meesho started out with a thrust on social commerce, but it has been increasingly focusing on direct sales and now derives 75 percent of its business directly from customers, while 25 percent comes from resellers.

“We set three sale records this year, each topping the previous one, with value-seeking consumers from all corners of the country choosing our everyday low prices and wide assortment,” said the company.

The Indian online shopper can be broadly divided into two categories: those who value convenience over price, and those who value price over convenience. While Meesho has always targeted value-seeking consumers, with e-commerce rival Flipkart launching its social commerce offering called Shopsy, to bring together sellers, resellers and consumers on its platform, the competition for non-metro markets has intensified.

India’s picks from Meesho

The orders varied from one state or one region to another. Tier 2+ markets inclined towards books with eight in 10 orders for self-help bestsellers like Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, Atomic Habits, The Psychology of Money and Rich Dad Poor Dad.

‘Smartwatch’ was the second-most searched product in 2022, while 60 percent of orders for men’s grooming products came from Tier 4 markets.

Meesho also added that a customer from Uttar Pradesh placed an order every waking hour, totalling a whopping 6,384 orders in 2022.

Also, Sundays were when India shopped the most on Meesho; last year, interestingly, it was Wednesday.

With increasing awareness around hygiene, orders for sanitary napkins grew ninefold in Tier 2+ cities. Also, sales of fitness equipment like dumbbells, treadmills, elliptical trainers and the like surged threefold as orders poured in from Srinagar and Mathura to Guntur and Siliguri.

Metros were not far behind as Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai ordered the most number of yoga mats.

Sellers’ gains

According to Meesho’s media statement, sellers on the platform collectively saved Rs 3,700 crore due to its zero-commission model.

It added, “130,000 Meesho sellers became lakhpatis and 6,000 became crorepatis in 2022, with Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh leading the charge. Thousands of these sellers came from small towns like Sagar, Rewa and Damoh (Madhya Pradesh), Panipat and Karnal (Haryana) and Sangli (Maharashtra).”

Meesho added around 5 lakh suppliers in 2022, with 61 percent of them new to e-commerce and selling online for the first time.