Five startups that help offline stores go online

With online platforms becoming an extremely important part of how customers shop, offline retailers are fast realising they need to reach out to the digital-savvy customers. Setting up a shop online, however, can be a daunting task, with multiple technologies, logistics providers and advertising strategies to choose from.

Recognising the potential, there has been a spurt in the number of startups becoming "e-commerce enablers" for these offline stores. These startups help retailers build their online stores in a matter of hours, providing full-stack support throughout.

E-commerce enablers help retailers with tools such as logistics services, payment gateways, analytics tool, marketing tools, mobile apps, customer engagement tools, so that they can run and manage their web stores from a single platform.

Investors, who believe that the enablers will play a crucial role in online retail, have starting looking at backing these firms. Several startups, some of them just about a year old, have raised funding. TechCircle lists a few startups that got funded in the past year, along with their key differentiators: