It Is S-Commerce's Turn Now

Move over e-commerce, it is now s-commerce’s turn in the sun.

- Venkatesha Babu

When Kiran Kumar, 37, a testing engineer with a leading software company in Bangalore, recently bought his own apartment, he was delighted, but also worried. “The flat needed plenty of work before my family and I could start living comfortably there,” he says. “We had to get some electrical tweaking done to connect the back-up power supply. We wanted additional wood work. We wanted a wash basin in a corner of the dining room. My daughter wanted a different colour on the walls of her room.”

Two years ago, getting all this done would have required Kumar to hunt down an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber and a painter separately, negotiate rates with each of them and closely supervise each one’s work. He would have had to search for them through his network of family and friends, or else by poring over directories, whether online or offline. “I did neither,” he says. “Instead, I downloaded an app called UrbanClap and got all the services together.”

First, UrbanClap had displayed prices clearly – and that, too, was an experience very different from what he had feared. “The prices were transparent, both for material and labour,” he says. “And there was no haggling, which I hate.” Thereafter, the handymen – whose back grounds UrbanClap had thoroughly checked in advance – turned up punctually every morning and completed the work to Kumar’s satisfaction.