Akash Shah, when procuring various goods and services for his agricultural equipment factory, realized that 90 percent of the materials are the long tail and businesses deal with 200-300 vendors to source these items. While these items only make up 10-20 percent of the total spends, they are critical in the day to day running of a factory. “I was in Singapore and was exploring a couple of ideas around B2B commerce based on my insight that the last 10 years have changed how consumers and individuals procure goods and services, be it be retail clothing or travel or food. Businesses are complex entities procuring diverse and various kinds of goods & services. I strongly felt a consolidated technology approach was the need of the hour. This is when I combined my insight on the industry and changing user behavior, and established NowPurchase,”says Naman Shah.

Today, NowPurchase is a B2B focused procurement platform which aims at the manufacturing segment. Since its inception in 2017, NowPurchase has created a smart procurement platform with a combination of a curated market place and purchase management software which is aimed at making industrial procurement painless and easy. “Now Purchase is here to make all indirect purchases(nonraw material) transparent and simple for the end customers. We receive inquiries across 30+ product categories right from complex cutting tools, bearings, fasteners, paints,

lubricants, safety items, electricals, motors and pumps to office supplies. These needs are complex in nature and can range from Rs 10 to Rs 10 lakhs,from a single item to a list of 1000+ items. Our in house procurement experts spend time understanding the customer needs, their application and then ensuring the best solution is provided without any bias to brand or margins,”speaks Naman Shah, Founder, NowPurchase.

NowPurchase is here to make all indirect purchases (non-raw material) transparent and simple for the end Customers

NowPurchase operates through three different services covering the MSME, Enterprise & the retail channel. With NowPaaS being the top-grossing service, the firm is doubling down on it and building industry specific solutions for its NowPaaS clients. Naman adds,“We are creating industry-specific solutions for our customers so that they can have a single window for all their purchases including highly industry specific materials. Some of our other services include PPO (Part Payment Option) where there is only e-commerce site offering customer an option to pay a part of the order on booking & balance on delivery. This becomes crucial as various industrial products are expensive & could have long lead times; Predictive Selling which we are working on using data to help our suppliers and buyers make smarter purchase and selling decisions; Equal focus on buyer & supplier where we are making industrial procurement painless, requires suppliers and clients to be equally motivated and incentivized.”

While NowPurchase is still at its nascent stage of changing how B2B industrial procurement works in India, it has successfully proved its mettle by working with clients like TATA Metaliks, IFB Industries, Skipper Pipes, CenturyPly, GreenPly, Mother Dairy, Nipha Group, Minera Steel & Power and Adhunik Group along with hundreds of MSMEs who form the core of our clientele. Naman believes that soon there will be multiple valuable and successful players in this space. “We are investing in building industry specific solutions in a fullstack approach right from procurement of goods, providing after sales services, credit and delivery. All of this through a seamless tech-enabled platform can help our users in making smarter decisions using data and machine learning. We will be investing and hiring across functions but primarily in technology and industrial expansion. We will keep repeating our industry-specific playbook and use that model to expand across multiple industrial clusters pan-India. This geographic expansion will be based on our digital customer acquisition and its demographics.”