HOW MEESHO CRACKED THE HINTERLAND CODE

The e-commerce firm's in-house logistics platform, Valmo, has drastically cut fulfillment costs

- Sowmya Ramasubramanian

Vidit Aatrey, Meesho's co-founder and CEO, says being public or private doesn't change anything for the company. "If you are not investing a lot in technology, you'll stay behind."

(REUTERS)

When Jaya Singh Yadav, a home-based home decor seller in Indore, started selling her wares online about six years ago, she was a tiny player in a city where logistics options were plentiful but fragmented. She gets most of her business through Meesho Pvt. Ltd, an e-commerce company, supplying low-cost home improvement goods to customers across Madhya Pradesh. Dozens of third-party delivery operators servicing different neighbourhoods delivered the goods, but coverage varied sharply across pin codes.

Reliability often depended on which partner happened to handle a particular shipment, while pickups shifted without notice, return cycles were inconsistent and tracking frequently disappeared between handovers.

To cope, Yadav built buffers into every part of the business—extra stock, flexible delivery commitments and handwritten logs to track parcels whenever shipments stalled. "It wasn't that the services were bad. It was just unpredictable, because no network covered every part of the city," she says.

Around late 2022, she noticed things beginning to stabilize. Pickups became more consistent, turnaround times shortened and fewer parcels got stuck mid-route. What she didn't know then was that Meesho had begun routing her shipments through local delivery partners plugged into Valmo, its in-house logistics layer.

"It just became more predictable. I knew when parcels would move and there were fewer surprises in between," she adds.