I completed two months at Limechat last week. I had joined them in September, and it’s been a great experience so far. Prior to joining them, I did not have much idea of the e-commerce space, particularly the D2C segment. It is estimated that the D2C industry in India will be worth more than $100 billion by 2025.

This growth will be driven by a lot of technological innovation, as businesses try to find better ways to engage with their customers, and offer them a superior shopping experience. This is where Limechat comes in, with its bots, WhatsApp rengagement and marketing campaigns, it aims to capture a major chunk of the pie.

Working at a startup comes with its own pros and cons. You tend to have a lot of responsibility, and workload generally is very high. Combine that with Manipal’s academic schedule and it became almost impossible to manage my time. But with the grind, came a lot of learning, and I am glad that I did not give up under pressure.

I joined the bot team, which is responsible for building bots for various clients and improving the bot framework that we use to build these bots. Over the last two months I managed to build bots for 4 different clients from two different industries- Pilgrim and Arata from beauty and personal care, while Coolberg and Ragecoffee were from food and beverages sector. I am not going to talk a lot about my work in this post. I want to focus more on the insights I gained while building these bots, and insights about the industry itself.

D2C brands generally find a niche market and use social media and other marketing tools to sell their products to the target audience. Some of these brands are 100% online and have little to no presence in the brick and mortar stores, or other channels like Nykaa or Amazon. They mainly target their campaigns through social media ads, and try ways to route customers to the website where they can complete the shopping process.

Here are some of the insights that I gained from building bots for D2C brands:

1. Shopify Rules Them All

More than 90% of the companies that I got a chance to work on, or explore in some capacity, had one thing in common; they all used shopify as their backend. Shopify is clearly the #1 choice for D2C brands for building their website. Shopify websites are easy to set up and maintain. Entrepreneurs with no experience can get started and have fully functional pages up and running in no time. I saw an example of this in my personal life, where my cousin and her startup’s co-founder set up a shopify website in 2 days (with no background in web development).

The flexibility of shopify APIs and a massive community support also helps in keeping the popularity of the platform. It also leverages GraphQL, which is very useful and helps developers to build new integrations for new features.