Tell us a bit about Shiprocket. What do you all do? How are you different from your competitors? In your assessment, how do customers perceive you?
Shiprocket is an eCommerce enablement platform supporting retailers, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Direct-to-customer (D2C) brands with tools for shipping, order management and customer engagement. We differentiate ourselves by evolving from a shipping provider to a comprehensive platform, offering end-to-end solutions for the entire eCommerce journey. With over 1.5 lakh sellers generating $3.5 billion in annual Gorss Merchandise Value (GMV), our technology-driven approach, like the Courier Recommendation Engine, helps optimise deliveries. Strategic partnerships, including India Post and ONDC, enhance our offerings, making us a key player in domestic and international eCommerce. Customers see us as a partner in growth, simplifying their operations and scaling their businesses.
How is Shiprocket leveraging technology to enhance its finance function? Can you mention some specific tools that have significantly affected your finance operations?
Leveraging technology in finance is essential for driving efficiency, accuracy and informed strategic decision-making within any organisation. Advanced financial tools allow us to automate routine tasks, provide real-time insights and support data-driven decisions that foster both growth and stability.
At Shiprocket, we’ve adopted a suite of advanced financial management solutions to streamline and optimise our finance function. Our internal CRM suite automates key processes like invoicing, reconciliations and financial reporting, significantly reducing manual effort and minimising the risk of errors. This system is tightly integrated with our Oracle ERP platform, which enables seamless, automated financial reporting and is linked with banks for automated payment processing.
In addition, we utilise visual Business Intelligence (BI) tools and meta-databases to automate reporting and generate insights across various financial tasks. For example, credit limit assessments are generated through system-driven analyses of multiple data points, further enhancing decision-making accuracy. We’ve also integrated AI-powered predictive analytics tools to improve our forecasting and planning capabilities, allowing us to anticipate trends and align our financial strategies with broader business objectives.
This comprehensive integration of technology not only improves our operational efficiency but also empowers the finance team to contribute more strategically to the company’s growth and long-term vision.
At times, the finance department is perceived as the “not so friendly one.” How do you ensure seamless and productive collaboration across other functions in your organisation to ensure the company’s objectives are met?
At Shiprocket, we see the finance team as strategic partners rather than mere gatekeepers of budgets. We actively cultivate a collaborative environment by engaging with other departments through regular cross-functional meetings and interactive workshops. Each of our business verticals has dedicated finance business partners who work closely with the respective business heads, effectively acting as mini-CFOs. These partners are deeply integrated into the business, focusing not just on financial data but also on business metrics, KPIs and performance data to provide actionable insights and drive value.
Our finance team is involved in all the key business reviews, helping leaders make strategic decisions by offering insights on pricing, customer retention, margins and cost structures. This approach ensures that our financial strategies are aligned with the company’s broader objectives, enabling every department to feel supported in achieving their goals.
The foundation of a strong business partnership lies in transparent communication, data visibility and user-friendly financial tools that make insights accessible and relevant to all teams. By simplifying complex financial and operational data into actionable insights, we help other departments understand how their work contributes to the company’s overall success. This open, collaborative approach fosters trust, builds a culture of teamwork and aligns everyone towards our shared objectives, making us more effective in reaching our goals together.
Given the current economic landscape, what strategies are you implementing at Shiprocket to navigate potential financial challenges in the coming fiscal year?
At Shiprocket, we are proactively implementing a series of strategies to navigate potential financial challenges, with a focus on optimising our business model, capital allocation and customer concentration risk, while continuing to invest in growth. Our objective is to strengthen cash flow, drive profitability and sustain long-term growth by adopting agile and resilient strategies.
First, our platform model and rapidly growing new offerings allow us to diversify our revenue streams. By expanding into new markets and developing additional tools and services that complement our core offerings, we are reducing our dependence on any single revenue source. For instance, our emerging tools and technologies offered to merchants have seen a 10x growth over the past two years, providing a strong foundation for future revenue diversification.
As we continue to vertically integrate across multiple offerings, we anticipate improved margins. We are heavily investing in checkout and conversion tools, which help drive down costs for merchants while enhancing service levels. This not only strengthens margins for Shiprocket but also benefits the merchants on our platform by improving their profitability.
On the cost side, we remain focused on cost optimisation through automation and data analytics. These technologies allow us to streamline operations, reduce overhead costs and improve overall efficiency. As a tech-driven business, Shiprocket benefits from significant operating leverage. Our scalable processes, driven by enhanced Generative AI, network intelligence and automated workflows, enable us to grow without significantly increasing operating costs.
Our business model also provides financial stability through negative working capital, as a large portion of our business is pre-paid through a closed wallet system. This ensures that we maintain healthy cash flow while continuing to invest in strategic growth initiatives.
Our customer acquisition strategy is largely digital, with 99 per cent of leads generated through our platform, website and digital marketing channels. A significant portion of this traffic (60-70 per cent) is organic, resulting in highly efficient customer acquisition costs (CAC), with payback periods of under three months. Moreover, our business serves over 1,50,000 merchants, ranging from micro-sellers to mid-sized merchants. This broad merchant base mitigates customer concentration risk and ensures revenue stability.
Lastly, we have strong partnerships with suppliers, logistics providers and other enablers, which enhances our supply chain resilience. These partnerships ensure consistent service delivery and help us navigate any disruptions in the broader economic environment.
How is Shiprocket promoting sustainable practices in its financial strategies?
In today’s evolving business landscape, sustainability has become a cornerstone for long-term success. As stakeholders increasingly prioritise ethical, environmentally friendly practices, companies must integrate sustainability into their core strategies to address not only environmental concerns but also regulatory compliance and evolving consumer expectations. For us a focus on great governance meant that from early on, infact from the last eight years we had a big four auditor, we have Board Committees despite being a private company. We have allocated employee resources to drive CSR initiatives.
We have invested in eco-friendly technologies and practices, such as optimising delivery routes to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. Additionally, we work closely with our vendor partners to encourage sustainable practices throughout the supply chain.
What role does a CFO play in promoting sustainability within their organisation?
As a CFO, promoting sustainability involves aligning financial goals with sustainable practices. This means evaluating the long-term financial impact of environmental initiatives and ensuring that they are both financially viable and aligned with the company’s strategic goals. At Shiprocket, I am part of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) committee and work closely with other departments to integrate sustainability into our financial planning and decision-making processes. This includes prioritising investments in sustainable technologies and practices that reduce our environmental footprint and contribute to our long-term growth.
How has your role as CFO evolved over the past few years, especially in the context of a rapidly growing company like Shiprocket?
My role as CFO at Shiprocket has evolved significantly in tandem with the company’s rapid growth, while still retaining core elements from the early days. From the outset, strong business partnering has been a cornerstone of my approach, ensuring that finance has always been closely aligned with operational goals. This partnership has only deepened over time, allowing finance to serve as a strategic co-pilot alongside the CEO, ensuring every major business decision is made with a clear understanding of its financial impact.
In the early stages, much of my focus was on governance and establishing solid systems for ERP, audits, system-driven invoicing, reconciliations and collections. As the company scaled, the scope of governance expanded to include the development of Board Committees, where key issues are debated rigorously and we’ve built a robust compliance function to support this. Our contracts are automated and so is compliance tracking.
With growth, one of the key challenges has been integrating systems across the business to support scaling. This involved implementing predictive tools and developing comprehensive dashboards to enable real-time financial insights, ensuring that we can make informed decisions quickly. Additionally, as we pursued multiple acquisitions over the past few years, my role has been crucial in the integration of these acquisitions, particularly from a migration and derivation of synergies standpoint, ensuring seamless alignment with our broader operations.
Through it all, I’ve remained committed to fostering rapid innovation while maintaining strict financial discipline. We prioritise unit economics to ensure sustainable growth and our deeply integrated reporting structures reflect that in our monthly reviews. This level of integration allows us to stay nimble and responsive while keeping a firm handle on our financial trajectory.