Beleaguered E-Commerce Firm ShopClues Continues to Lose High-profile Staff

Two higher-ups at Shopclues.com have resigned. Nitin Kochhar, Senior Vice-President for Categories and Marketplace, and Raunak Raheja, Director of Category Management, have decided to leave Shopclues.com.

A glance at their LinkedIn profiles shows that Kochhar has already changed his profile as having joined start-up Rivigo as Business head for Zoom. While Raheja’s profile hasn’t shown any changes yet, he deemed to join Flipkart in Mumbai.

Kochhar came to ShopClues in 2015 after serving in Flipkart as a Director of Category. In the same year, Raheja too was onboard, previously Head for Retail Imports at eBay. At ShopClues he looked after growth of categories and profitability.

Business Line quoted a ShopClues spokesperson, “Nitin had decided to move out of e-commerce and Raunak moved out of NCR for family reasons.”

The news of these high-level exits have come when ShopClues is stuck in a tiff between Amazon and Flipkart. After Amazon and Flipkart’s entry into the small city market places, ShopClues’ growth has slowed down. The company is also facing a cash crunch, in spite of counting investors such as Tiger Global, Nexus Venture Partners and GIC. However, it has managed to raise $1 million fund from Ronnie Screwvala’s Unilazer Ventures. According to Business Line, ShopClues has obtained 1,027 equity shares from its US parent Clues Network Inc to be allotted to Unilazer, against this funding.

Business Line cited data from the research firm Tofler, saying that the company’s total revenues grew marginally by 5 per cent at ?188 crore in 2017 as against a two-fold jump the previous year. However, the company’s losses declined by 13 per cent to ?332 crores during FY17.

ShopClues still believes that they can come through all their setbacks, since their online business is going strong and they do not see either Flipkart or Amazon as a competitor. As Sanjay Sethi, founder of ShopClues said to The Tech Panda in an interview in December, “We were very clear from Day 1 that we will focus on Middle India.”