Indian food delivery and e-commerce startup Swiggy is turning one of its small businesses into a Shopify alternative. Swiggy Minis, a small business alternative, is now being transformed into a LinkinBio service aimed at service providers like nutritionists and fitness trainers.
The new avatar, Swiggy Minis, acts as a landing page for sellers to guide their target customers from their social media pages. The company said it will soon add integration with Google Calendar so that service providers can have a booking module.
Swiggy launched Minis in 2022 as an experiment to provide small merchants with a code-free Shopify alternative. It allowed merchants to create sites, upload catalogs, and manage orders, shipments, and transactions without paying any fees. Swiggy also provided a sort of discoverable marketplace in the app where end users could find these stores.
With this overhaul, the startup removes the discovery layer from Minis, though customers will still be able to see their saved stores or stores they’ve ordered from in the past.
The company takes no commission from sellers and allows sellers to set up pages that support multiple social links and themes.
Swiggy has announced that it will revamp its Mini homepage to focus on repeat purchases.
“As a SaaS platform, our primary goal with Minis is to enable sellers to quickly create operational websites. We have observed strong momentum on sellers’ social media pages and hence decided to prioritize this channel for discovery,” a Swiggy spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The company added that it is expanding its service beyond physical products to accommodate digital offerings from a variety of service providers. In addition to Google Calendar integration, it is adding Google Reviews as a rating system for these service providers.
Swiggy said it has informed merchants about the disappearance of their stores from the discovery layer. Merchants who were relying on Swiggy’s Minis discovery mechanism to reach out to customers will have to promote their stores elsewhere.
But in an email newsletter sent to sellers confirmed by TechCrunch, the company claimed that only 5-10% of customers landed directly on a seller's store page via Swiggy Mini.
The company claims that Swiggy Minis delivers better conversion rates than other platforms even without a discovery layer. Moreover, stores can expect more repeat customers since customers can view their past orders and favorite stores in the Minis section, Swiggy says.
Other link-in-bio services, like Linktree, offer both appointment booking and storefronts. 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 in an initial public offering in India, has spent the past few years focusing on expanding its quick-commerce platform Instamart, which competes with food delivery rival Zomato (owned by BlinkIt) and Lightspeed-backed unicorn Zepto.
Both BlinkIt and Zepto work with brands to sell and promote their products on their platforms, but neither has a SaaS offering for smaller sellers and creators.
