The pursuit of winning the great Indian kirana race

These days we all are sitting at home due to ongoing lockdown and trying to do everything digitally. In this digital story, when you look at buring grocery online, you need to grapple with a constant struggle of finding delivery slot. You cannot find a delivery slot easily these days even for essential items. Hard Truth!

 Ultimately, you have to resort to a small store (also call it kirana Shop) located in your society where you put-up to fulfil your daily needs of grocery items. That is the power of kirana retailer!  

All the comm biggies which were burning billions of dollars to ramp-up e-grocery vertical in pre covid timing are not able to serve you in this time of crisis. Today, everybody smells a big business opportunity in mom and pop stores and everything wants to onborad them on their digital network.

Reliance has spotted this opportunity much earlier and had piloted the project in 2017.

Facebook fuelling Ambani’s bet on Local Kirana

Untill Covid 19 has hit,  retail biggies have started thinking mom and pop retail is dead. It was  Mukesh Ambani led Jio which had started the ambitious plan of  linking manufactures and kirana stores to his Reliance Jio customers and mint money. Under the scheme of things,  Jio was offering  its subscribers digital coupons to buy goods at kirana stores at discounted rates. The plan was not to spend money on discounts but to mediate between manufactuers and kirana stores to benefit the subscribers. And, it will be an effective way to add and retain subscribers for Jio. The company has pilot this project of this scheme in Mumbai, Chennai and Amemdabad.

This Wednesday, Facebook has announced massive plans which will further boost the digital kirana story of Reliance. Reliance Retail Limited and WhatsApp have also entered into a commercial partnership agreement to further accelerate Reliance Retail’s new commerce business on the JioMart platform using WhatsApp and to support small businesses on WhatsApp.

According to the deal, the local vendors and kirana stores can register on JioMart, Reliance’s online groceries delivery platform, and will receive their orders through WhatsApp. It is worth noticing that WhatsApp has also attracted 340 million users in the country. So kirana owners who will register on JioMart will have a better business scope who are heavily dependent on offline sales.

Amazon Plunges into the race

After a  massive investment of Rs 43, 574 Crore in Reliance JioMart by Facebook, Amazon India too has announced the ambitious plan of partnering with local kirana shops and let them sell their products via Amazon.in.  This new venture has been called as ‘Local Shops on Amazon’.

Annoucing on Twitter, Gopal Pillai, VP, Amazon Market Place Tweets”  Local Shops on Amzon, a program enabling local retailers ans shopkeepers of all sizes to leverage Amazon’s technology and grow their footprint digitally. After a successful pilot with 5000+ stores, we are pledging Rs10 cr to scale the program.

Local shops can play a bigger role during this time of need by serving customer needs while maintaining social distancing.

Other than Amazon, this yeas cash and carry retailer Metro cash and carry too has announced the enhancement of kirana partnership with a vision to make kirana store smater in terms of usage of technology. As of Feburary 2020, this wholesale retailer has partnered 2000 kirana stores in Bangaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi  to offer end to end retail solutions.

Clearly, everybody wants a pie of digital kirana as post covid effect, This space will be buzzing with  plethora of exciting announcements in this time to come.

Stay Tuned!