Khadi and Village Industry Commission’s (KVIC) foray into the online marketing segment has found tremendous public patronage. Testimony to this is the gross turnover of over Rs 1.12 crore in just 8 months of the launch of Khadi’s e-portal www.khadiindia.gov.in.
Launched on July 7, 2020, Khadi e-portal has delivered orders to over 10,000 customers out of the 65,000 people who visited the e-portal till date. The KVIC has also delivered more than 1 lakh articles/commodities to these customers. During this period, the average online purchase has recorded at Rs 11,000 per customer, which is an indication of Khadi’s ever-growing popularity and the diversity of its product range.
Minister of MSME Nitin Gadkari has lauded Khadi’s successful e-commerce venture saying this provided a wide marketing platform for various Khadi and village industry products to a larger population. “E-marketing of Khadi is proving to be a game-changer. Our efforts should be to reach a turnover of Rs 200 crore per year,” Gadkari said.
KVIC has developed the e-portal in-house without spending a single rupee on web-developing. Unlike other online portals, the KVIC takes care of all logistics and infrastructure support like cataloguing, product photoshoot, maintaining online inventory and packaging and transportation of goods to the customers’ doorsteps. This saves Khadi artisans, institutions and PMEGP units manufacturing Khadi products from any financial burden. “All expenses incurred on operating Khadi e-portal is borne by the KVIC. While in case of other e-commerce sites, product cataloguing, packaging and dispatch are the responsibility of the respective sellers, KVIC has a policy that the Khadi institutions and PMEGP units are exempted from any such financial and logistical burden. This saves them a lot of money and, therefore, Khadi’s e-portal is a unique platform for lakhs of Khadi artisans,” KVIC Chairman Vinai Kumar Saxena said.
Khadi’s online sale that started with just Khadi Face Masks during the Covid-19 lockdown, has evolved into a full-fledged E-market platform with nearly 800 products.
