Now Do Guilt free shopping and charity the “Sumara” way

Sumara covered by infothatmatter

Online shopping is the latest trend in metro cities where people indulge themselves in discounts and free deals while purchasing latest needs and fantasies. Another rising trend among urban people is ‘Go-Green’ – think responsibly and make a  difference through donations. What if we combine both of these trends together and Viola, we have a Jackpot! Sumara is an upcoming startup looking forward to converting your fun-filled shopping spree into responsible shopping.

Sumara is a simple Chrome browser extension that lets users make FREE donations whenever they shop online on e-commerce stores like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong and Shopclues. All this at no extra cost or efforts from the user.

What is the donation problem with Charity Organizations?

1) Trust and Transparency: Although there is a number of NGOs and relief fund companies which work for poor people, still their reach is limited. Some e-commerce websites and organizations give just a percentage of their revenue to NGO. Like MakeMyTrip has the option to take 5Rs per transaction from a customer for MakeMyTrip Foundation. For every four Classmate notebooks purchased, ITC contributes ₹1 to its social development initiative that supports, among other projects, primary education. Either people do not trust them, or there is an issue of transparency. People nowadays want to know where their money has been used exactly.
2) Frequency and intent mismatch: People don’t do it as often as they should. Very few of us actually make the effort to search for an NGO or charitable organisation and then make a contribution. When people see some needy person, they feel sorry and then choose to carry on with their lives thinking there is nothing much possible with a tiny charity.
3) Financial constraints: In fast-paced metro lives, often people live on the credit card, they spend every single penny consciously. Some people cannot afford even small donations, while some have thought process, that they are doing enough charity already. After all, they are paying Income tax, taxes on all purchases and even doing charity in religious places.

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Solution Provided by Sumara

The idea behind a platform like this is to encourage donations in Indian society. Indians do not make as many donations as they should. As online shopping is already on the rise especially in metro cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, it would be a good idea to piggyback on the shopping behaviour of consumers to encourage them to do donations. With Sumatra, it is a duo combination of donations and online shopping. This is a Feel-Good Shopping where a portion of your spending goes to a good cause.

1. No extra cost: With Sumara, we are taking it one step ahead. Instead of adding Re 1/- or Rs 5/-where a user actually pays that money, you can now make a bigger contribution without putting in any money.
2. No extra effort: User shops the way he normally does. There is absolutely no change for him. The user does not have to remember any extra trigger points that happen with a lot of platforms currently present.

3. Transparency: with one-click donations at checkout, a user is clueless where his Re 1 or Rs 5 went or did it actually have any impact. Sumara team aim to make it 100% transparent. Users can track their donations and see where exactly the donation went and how it was utilised. This gives a sense of satisfaction to the donor.

4. How It Works
Sumara can be installed from the Chrome Web Store. It is a one-click install. Once installed, it is Done. Now, whenever a user shops online, he will be able to make a donation.

Market Scope and Statistics

There are close to 660,000 e-commerce companies with online revenue < $1M coming from web sales all over the world.  Amazon in US had $147B e-commerce sales in 2016. This is up from the $112B sales that Amazon did selling products in 2015. That’s a $35B increase in a year!(Source: Hackernoon).

The number of digital buyers in Asia Pacific is projected to pass the one billion mark for the first time in 2018. Current active e-commerce penetration in India stands only 28 percent, with lots of room for improvement – India’s retail e-commerce CAGR is projected to reach 23 percent from 2016 to 2021.

E-commerce Market scope
Above infographics shows a forecast of the number of digital buyers in India up to 2020, based on factual numbers from 2014 to 2016. In 2020, over 329 million people in India are expected to buy goods and services online, up from 130.4 million in 2016. [Source: eMarketer]

The average ticket size of online shopping stands at Rs 1750 per transaction per user. [Source]. On a shopping order of Rs 1750, a user can donate up to Rs 120 (depending on the category of the purchase) via Sumara. That is a huge difference when compared to contributing just Rs 5.

The journey so far and future

Sumara is a flagship product by the company Flabber Technology and Services. It has been founded by husband-wife duo Nikhil Bansal and Ayushi Sinha. They started working on Sumara in May and the product became LIVE in the last week of June 2018. In the short duration of 2 months, Via Sumara, there have been 300 transactions so far and they have made a contribution of total Rs 10,000/- to World Vision. They have also partnered with Small Change as their donation partners.

Sumara team has the aim to make their app global soon so that they can tap the potential of online shoppers all around the world. They currently only have chrome extension for the desktop site. They are planning to cover other browsers like Safari and Firefox in near future. Also, they are planning to introduce tax benefits to all our donors at the end of each year. Amazon Smile has their own similar program to donate to charity, hence they are the biggest competitors of Sumara.

How does donation occur
At every product page on the e-commerce websites, Sumara displays the user how much money would be donated from his side if he were to buy this product. As soon as an order is placed, they let the user know where exactly his money is going. This creates an instant gratification for the user where the user has 100% transparency about his donations.

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About the Founders

Nikhil Bansal: Ex-founder of Parcelled.in, a logistics based startup featured in NDTV and Forbes 20 for their Tech Innovations. An ardent technologist who developed high scale systems for the digital team of Flipkart.

Ayushi Sinha: Ex-founder of Helpingo, a chat-based communication and collaboration platform used by universities connecting students, teachers and parents. Injected user-experience design into dozens of companies including major e-tailer, Myntra. Also, she was a part of Top 50 Women Entrepreneurs by NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore.

According to Ayushi, “This is a great way to encourage donations in India. We aim to make donations as hassle-free and easy as online shopping is.”

 

Nitika Garg
Entrepreneur | Senior Content Writer | Technical Writer | Startup Writer She is a software engineer by education and content writer by passion. She has 8+ years of overall experience in the industry. She has written 300+ articles in different domains. She has graduated from “Iron Lady Corporate Leadership Program for Women Leaders” which is recognized by TISS, Mumbai.