- Ashish Choudhary, COO & Co-founder, Business Fuel LLP

It is a long standing problem that end-users from the heavy machinery industry are facing an information gap, difficulty in financing, comparison of products, buying spare parts, and there is no one-stop solution available. Also, OEMs have been facing a similar set of issues like unqualified leads, increase in cost of marketing, lead nurturing and customer rapport. To resolve these, Bengaluru-based startup Business Fuel LLP has launched a new platform - Metacrust.com. This H2H e-commerce platform has been set up with the aim to revolutionise the way infrastructure, mining and the construction industry works in India.

Metacrust.com is an emerging trading platform for machinery, equipment, plants, spare parts and related equipment of these machines. Ashish Choudhary, COO & Co-founder, Business Fuel LLP, shares more on the solutions it will provide.

Tell us more about Metacrust.com and the motive behind its launch.
With this new platform, we aim to eliminate the pain points faced by those belonging to the heavy machinery industry. This revolutionary H2H e-commerce platform will focus on both, the B2B and B2C markets. Metacrust.com is an emerging trading platform for machinery, equipment, plants - both new and old, and their spare parts. Our prime focus is to make this comprehensive portal a one-stop solution for the end-users in the industry.

While all the industries have solutions online, the heavy machinery industry largely remains offline and non-tech savvy. And, Metacrust.com aims to help these non-tech savvy users to look for solutions online in an easy way. Customers can buy online or through their smartphones, placing their orders conveniently 24 x 7 even over a phone call.

Which are the 14 different industries that this platform will serve and in what way?
The 14 different industries that we cater to are: Agriculture and forestry, cranes, drilling, earthmoving, construction equipment, material handling, mining and bulk material handling, mining plant and machinery, construction plant and machinery, port equipment, public utility and transportation.

The platform provides end-to-end solutions, addressing problems like information gap, difficulty in financing, inability to make comparisons between products, need for timely maintenance and faster availability of spare parts.

What are the innovative solutions that Business Fuel LLP can offer to overcome these challenges?
The unorganised construction sector poses several challenges and along side offers several opportunities as well. We are collaborating traditional buying with digital, wherein even a non-tech customer can easily make things happen in his favour. Custom quote, make offer, real-time price compare, and similar features and benefits, makes the customer prone positively towards our platform. We are making our effort to ensure that customers´ expectations in lieu of their bottlenecks and buying decisions are satisfactorily met. And, we intend to make them a repetitive and loyal customer to our platform.

What does Metacrust.com have to offer to the Business-to-Business market?
The B2B market e-commerce is twice as big as B2C e-commerce, and we fall under the B2B cum B2C model, where we cater to both businesses and end-users. Opportunities are abundant, but less has been explored.

For OEMs, service providers and allied industries, the benefits are enormous.

Through Metacrust.com, they will get an increased market reach, including exposure in new markets, increase in enquiries and sales, and an increase in brand awareness and customer satisfaction as this platform meets the customers´ entire needs. They will also get a worldwide active digital presence, assurance of verified and qualified leads close to closure. Also, customers will get access to the network of Metacrust enablers working indirectly for them to bring-in new customers.

How does your tie-up with OEMs work?
We aggregate the sales through OEMs and their dealers, benefitting both seller and the buyer in many ways. We have on-boarded leading OEMs on our platform to display the complete range of their products with technical specifications. Also, we have on-boarded a list of dealers from different geographies of India, dealing with spare parts who display products and their compatibilities to respective machines, thus increasing their digital presence, adding value and obviously additional revenue. Our platform has a unique lead generation and qualification system, through which the OEMs get vetted leads, with detailed reports of the customer´s journey right to when he makes the decision to buy, helping them to close sales efficiently and saving lead nurturing time and cost.

We are an aggregating e-commerce dealing with machines, spares and rental of machines along with sales of used machines. Having said that, we would be eyeing ourself to be a provider and aggregator in rental equipment pan-India sooner or later.

How does the platform plan to be a one-stop solution for heavy machine and the equipment industry?
This industry has highly engineered products, and not all products fit into everyone´s need. Here, Metacrust is introducing a customisation solution, where customers can build their machine requirements and submit their final RFP for their required machine. This is niche and not being practiced digitally so far.

Moreover, Metacrust.com offers technology that will enable business diversification. It connects manufacturers to customers, manufacturers to dealers or wholesalers, dealers to dealers, dealers to logistic providers, and so on. There are a lot of value-additions that makes Metacrust a one-stop solution for the heavy machines and equipment industry, such as:

• Knowledge resource to bridge the information gap.
• Real-time experienced advisors from the industry.
• Customisation as per requirement.
• Human verified business model.
• Order fulfillment and logistic support.
• Reduce sales cycle-time as the platform will undertake data exchange, comparisons, user-browsing behaviour tracking and applies algorithms to auto trigger business processes.

What are the benefits you have to offer for OEMs? Also, what is the kind of support on financing models for equipment?
It is crucial for brands to have a powerful B2B e-commerce platform in the digital era. The Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi too is helping this happen with the Digital India initiative. This allows brands to connect with buyers in a powerful way through instant information, quotes, ordering, crisp communication, data and sales analysis across the sales cycle.
Benefits for OEMs:

• Human verified and qualified leads and sale deal closures.
• Worldwide active digital presence.
• Low-cost marketing benefit.
• Low-cost lead nurturing.
• Network of Metacrust enablers working indirectly for OEMs.
• One-stop customer support and complaints redressal.
• One-stop solution for OEM´s customers.
• On the finance part, the company is in talks with different loan providers, both banks and NBFCs, such as HDFC, Kotak and Srei, to get the best deals on RoI on loans. India being a price-sensitive market, Metacrust.com has been negotiating for lower interest rates, which currently ranges between 11-14 per cent.

Going forward, how do you see this platform adding to the company´s overall business? What is the company´s current growth, and by how much per cent is Metacrust.com expected to contribute to this growth?
In the near future, we see Metacrust.com serving as a primary platform (digital and traditional) for end-users to make their buying decisions, which itself would add a lot of value to the core business intangibly. Talking about tangible outcome, we see spare parts e-commerce and equipment rentals serving as primary revenue builder and boosting sales of new equipment. We have just begun, and our growth trajectory is positive and will remain positive as we would be going global in a phased manner, with the Middle East or GCC and the European market, where we will be launching our services by April 2017.

Metacrust.com is the primary product of Business Fuel as a company, and we have started with IT development services as part of the vertical expansion of Business Fuel. We have gathered few projects on the Mobile App development and customised software development to start with. Apart from this, Business Fuel is interested in other verticals, and the team is working on the same; hopefully, there will be another arm added to our business sometime in 2017 that will be into Human Resource Development.

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