The challenge here is to change habits of the customer!

With so many businesses out there, it is difficult to grab your customer’s attention, said Nitin Sawhney, Founder and CEO of  iOrderFresh during a candid chit-chat with Retailer Media..

Tell us about the inception of iorderfresh? 

Supply Chain Analytics and Technologies’ iOrderFresh is a technology platform delivering farm fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, dairy products, groceries, beverages & dry fruits to customers across the NCR region, having commenced its operations in December 2014
The Company markets its products through a mobile app named iOrderFresh (~94,000 active registrations), available on Android and iOS.
 It currently serves over 1000 orders per day across New Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida generating a monthly revenue run rate of INR 1.1 Crs.ü
The company has in place a dedicated procurement and quality team having direct relationships with farmers and artisans ensuring sourcing of superior quality product  iOrderFresh currently follows a unique ‘zero inventory, next day delivery model’. All orders placed prior to midnight are delivered to customers the following day before 12 noon. Orders placed by 12 noon are delivered same day between 3-8 pm.

How do you plan to position your brand amidst the increasing competition?
With the pace at which digital literacy & online grocery shopping is evolving in India we focus to position ourselves as a provider of Premium quality grocery . We strive to fulfil all needs of a consumer’s kitchen with our portfolio of products. 

Who do you think are your competitors, and what are your strategies to compete with them?
The biggest competition to iOrderFresh as of now is ‘inertia’ on the part of the consumer to order using a mobile App or website. The challenge here is to change the habits of the customer and make them shift to Online Grocery Shopping. A combination of convenience, quality products and hard to find premium groceries will do the trick for us. E-commerce already has an edge over the local shops in the way of tailoring promotions based on customer behavior, which local shops cannot readily offer. For now, we plan to make the right customers realize that the entire supermarket is actually in their pockets.

How do you reach out to your consumers?
With so many businesses out there, it is difficult to grab your customer’s attention. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, there is a variety of ways to reach out. We like to talk to our customers through social media platforms- a perfect way to communicate with anyone, direct emails, In-App notifications, SMS campaigns and so on. We also encourage our existing customers to refer their friends and family to earn Free Credits for purchases on our App. we plan to get our feet on street team to run direct customer activation campaigns very soon with interesting on-ground activities.

 How do you maintain inventory?

We have a zero overnight inventory model for all fresh product categories. for categories with a higher shelf-life i.e. packaged branded grocery, we have vendors who keep inventory in our warehouse on consignment basis. the business has a NIL inventory carrying cost as we do not invoice to consumers directly….we merely provide the technology platform for approved vendors to sell to our customers. 

Online space is all about discounts how you maintain a balance between discounts and profitability.
We are focusing on building a profitable business model, which is self-sustainable and does not require high capital infusion every few months. to achieve this we are focusing on minimizing wastage and middlemen markups on fresh food categories, getting better margins from current vendors with increasing scale of the business and launching our private label brands for staples, which typically have a healthier margin for the business.

Where do you see your brand in the next 5 years?

In this space 5 years is a very long time to make any reasonable prediction. for now we want to concentrate our efforts on being the brand of choice for all premium customers across Delhi NCR. We want to be biggest player in our market and only then look at replacing the model across other cities.