Etailers helping Kiranas & SMBs prosper online

As a retail aficionado, if you are hooked with the Internet, you might not look anywhere else. And since today, customer acquisition has become a play far greater than making actual profit, take, as a case in point, any home-grown ‘thriving’ etailer, the Internet is paving as the highway to reach out to the last mile.

Looking into our recent past, one would have never thought of going through a detailed catalogue to find out the vegetables and fruits available in the market, or pumps for that matter. Yes, pumps. Domestic, agriculture, submersible pumps. Every etailer today is focusing on being a customer centric company and enabling them to buy anything and everything they want online.

One would have thought of saving some money and investing every month to start a business instead: for that first carefully selecting a location, looking into the logistics support, taking care of marketing and various fulfillment aspects requires a lot of mettle. But, things have changed. On the online marketplace, everything is taken care of through various service platforms

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Today, both businesses and customers are looking at the Internet as an enabler. Take ShopClues for instance. Vishal Sharma, VP, Operations, ShopClues.com puts some light on the primary objective of the etailer, “What happens is that as a technology platform, we provide them services like marketing, fulfilment, payment services, and customer support. It covers everything beyond the price and the product, which an SMB would understand best. Beyond that, any help that any SMB requires selling online, whether it is getting customers for its store, giving him fulfilment and logistics support, the payment services etc, i.e. all the anxiety behind playing out in the larger eCommerce business is addressed through the services we provide through our technology platform at ShopClues.com.”

There are as many as 140,000 sellers on board with ShopClues today, who are able to sell 120,000 articles per day. “Isn’t this a true reflection of the Indian Bazaar?” says a content Sharma.

Amazon.in too is getting the Kiranas to work with them with the Amazon Pickup programme. “The programme is an effort of Amazon Logistics to work with communities and small businesses. We carefully look for like-minded business owners who are extremely passionate towards customers and have a burning desire to perform and grow. These businesses work with us as our last mile delivery partners and help Amazon packages reach the customer’s doorstep,” says an Amazon spokesperson.

The Amazon Pickup programme today has extended to over 800 stores across 45 cities including Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Vellore, Nasik, Vijaywada, Tuticorin, Tanjore, Trichy, Manipal, Vadodara, Salem, Ludhiana, Rajkot and more.

K.S. Bhatia, a chemical engineer by education and the founder of pumpkart.com, was gifted the domain by his son, which made him change gears from being an offline seller of 15 years to being an online etailer providing all sorts of water pumps. “I am doing that since the last six months and the response has been amazing,” says a proud KS Bhatia. The etailer claims to having helped connect 400 pump manufacturers and more than 1 Mn hardware and sanitary ware dealers on a single platform collectively.

So, the evolution is happening in the entire digital platform and etailers today have graduated from being technology-centric to being customer-centric, helping them get anything and everything they want online. In the process, of course, helping and empowering small and medium businesses sell online across the country.