Meet Khareed.pk: A platform aiming to simplify procurement in Pakistan

Procurement, especially for startups and businesses in their infancy, has always been a challenging and time taking process. With the problems associated with widely varying quality, prices and the involvement of middle-man, getting supplies and equipment has always been an uphill battle.

Khareed.pk, with its strong vetting process and easy two-way communication with vendors, is aiming to simplify the procurement process. Today we are taking a look at how this platform came to be and how will this help the average joe.

Idea behind Khareed.pk

Starting a new business is always a very challenging task. Especially those businesses where a lot of expensive machinery or equipment is required. Usually, businesses employee some middle-man to take care of the multiple trips to the marketplace that it takes to get quotations and delivery information. The added cost, both of time and finances, and unreliability of the middle-man has always been a major headache for most small and medium-sized businesses.

Haroon Sethi, the CEO and main man behind Khareed.pk, realized the severity of this problem when he was working as a consultant in a local factory. He realized that most consultants and vendors were not completely honest with their dealings and this led to some pretty significant losses, something which is poison for a budding business.

He set out to solve this problem once and for all, and that’s where he had the idea for a centralized platform which facilitated two-way communication between client and the vendor, thus eliminating the need for a middle-man. This idea manifested in the form of Khareed.pk. After launching in 2014, it took Khareed.pk only a year to launch its commercial operations and it has since following both free consumer-based model and a subscription-based service for large companies.

How does it work?

For regular visitors, Khareed.pk provides a simple request a quote feature right on the homepage. From here, you can enter the details of the product that you want and request a quotation. You will then be provided a list of vendors carrying that product. You can then directly communicate with the vendors and negotiate a good price.
Anybody who visits the website can request a quote, however, if you manage a large business and are looking to buy similar items in batches over a specified period of time, Khareed.pk offers a subscription-based service which provides other benefits than simply requesting a quote.

The packages are divided into two categories; one is for the businesses who are looking to sell and the other is for those who are looking to simplify their procurement process.
The packages for Spectrum Sales are divided into following categories:

• Proprietor (free)
• Merchant (5,000 PKR/Month)
• Commercial (10,000 PKR/Month)
• Corporate (25,000 PKR/Month)

The added cost to Merchant and higher packages add some very useful capabilities as invoicing, transaction history, workflows, approvals and much more.

The packages are Prism Procurement are divided into these categories:

• Professional (10,000 PKR/Month)
• Commercial (25,000 PKR/Month)
• Corporate (48,000 PKR/Month)
• Enterprise (125,000 PKR/Month)

These packages come with the added benefit of contact books, market analytics, purchase orders, transactions history and physical sourcing support.

In only two to three years, Khareed.pk has made huge in-roads with some big companies in Pakistan. A large number of startups are also making use of Khareed.pk’s services to purchase their required equipment, all the while avoiding the middle-man and multiple unnecessary trips to different marketplaces.

Procurement is usually a very unexciting field for new startups to invest in. The trend of just getting the services of middle-men and leaving all to them has been the trend so far. Khareed.pk has, to some extent, has very successfully, taken the whole procurement procedure and made it into something which is much simpler and more manageable than before.