New Delhi based Bigshoebazaar India, an online wholesaler and retailer of shoes, apparel, bags, accessories and gift items, raises 40 crore in series B round of funding. Investors include Nexus Venture Partners and Catamaran Ventures.

The company is founded in September 2009 by a group of entrepreneurs including Nitin Agarwal, Manmohan Agarwal, Danish Ahmed, and Rajul Jain. Bigshoebazaar operates a hybrid online wholesale cash and carry business as well as an e-commerce website, yebhi.com, which was earlier known as bigshoebazaar.com. Late last year, the company raised their series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners. They source their products from Brands, including Lotto, Woodland, Bata and Puma; directly or authorized agent of the brand and run their own warehousing operations to enable them to fulfill their orders completely and achieve fastest shipping. A sales team supports them to transact offline with retailers and run a parallel franchisee business, through which it has 13 franchise stores in alliance with small retailers under its own brand name. They have about five lakh-registered users with 1.5 lakh active buyers and attract 70,000 visitors daily.

Bigshoebazaar began as an online shoe-store with an average of five orders a day, but currently they handle between 4,000-5,000 products each day and have expanded their verticals from shoe-store to apparel, jewellery, bags and other related products. They offer free shipping and cash on delivery along with a 30-day return policy. Shailesh Vickram Singh from Seedfund said that e-commerce in India is now getting into Tier II and III and is capitalizing by bridging the broken supply chain model.