How B2B Has Been Keeping Up Since the LockdownThe disruption because of this pandemic has created a lot opportunities for the space

印度是six-month nation-wide lockdown; and slowly things are getting back to normal. Though if we look at the brighter side, this pandemic has brought us a lot of opportunity. The disruption caused by this pandemic has made almost all the fields to incorporate new technologies to accelerate businesses.

B2B, or business-to-business, have also found a way amidst this pandemic to flourish and also has introduced various modern technologies to help them do so. Akshay Hegde, co-founder and managing director at ShakeDeal says that it was around one week before the nation-wide lockdown that there was a self-imposed lockdown at ShakeDeal. The disruption because of this pandemic has created a lot opportunities in his field of work. He says that he saw an increased demand in medical textile during this pandemic. Further he talks about the time when COVID situation was not that bad in India and a lot of PPE kits and other medical textiles were exported to China.

After the situation got worst here, there were various difficulties that they had to overcome, transport being one of them. Transportation was a challenge during this lockdown.

According to Samarth Agrwal, CEO and co-founder at MaxWholeSale, "We saw growth in business." During the lockdown the whole-sellers and FMCG found it impossible to get connected to the market. Here MaxWholeSale comes into the picture. They helped them in connecting to the market and retailers. He found that the order volumes increased ten times.

Talking about the difficulties, he had only one-third of the employees. "So the situation was that orders increased but we had a very limited man power in our hands." He also adds that even working with those limited employees were not easy as the ones who lived on rent weren't allowed by their landlord or landlady to work due to the fear of COVID. So they had to find accommodation for those employees. The families weren't ready to send their family member to work and the company offered them a pay raise.

最好的部分是移动应用如何帮助them a lot in order to maintain social distancing. The application made the work more feasible by making a to-do kind of thing for every employee which made their work easier.

It was how they survived or did business by gathering the resources they had at their disposal. But was there something that might have made their work easier if it was present at that time or something that would have made their work less hectic? Hegde says that he found that a runner application would have helped in accelerating and enabled a lot of movement without any difficulties.

Agarwal's already built "Kirana" network is very dependable. While with that same traditional network people are now more aware of the new technologies and are readily learning about them and how to use them. He is working to introduce a B2C application for retailers and their customers. People are now more comfortable with online payment methods. Also he is launching a payment gateway called MaxPay that will be more B2B focused and for transferring larger amount.

This COVID and this nation-wide lockdown has helped us to be more involved with the technologies and the upcoming trends. People are now more comfortable using them. The introduction of mobile applications have made the work more easier, safer and interesting.