E-Grocers Confident About Future, Want To Concentrate On Cracking The Indian Market

There has always been some amount of skepticism about selling groceries online—Will customers alter their grocery shopping habits? Is the business model viable? Is it scalable? These were some of the questions asked and although they haven’t been completely answered, there is, however, now signs of e-grocery retailers thriving or at least moving in the right direction in the country.

At the International Management Institute New Delhi’s (IMI) pilot entrepreneurship summit, E-Merge, entrepreneurs operating in the online grocery space including Big Basket’s Abhinay Choudhari, PepperTap’s Navneet Singh and Aramshop’s Vijay Singh came together for a panel discussion on the space, the experiences of starting and the future.

Most of the panel conceded that it has taken a while for people to become confident about workability of an e-grocery store.

Explaining, Big Basket’s Abhinay Choudhari said that the initial resistance and skepticism he met was due to a history of unsuccessful businesses in the space with the biggest being Webvan which received a lot of funding and was massively hyped during the dot-com bubble, only to go bankrupt in 2001, becoming a poster boy of failed startups.

“Just tell Abhinay that he is very brave,” said Choudhari, quoting one of the reactions he got which scouting for investors to back his idea.

“However, once a few people begin to see the value, everyone begins to see value—It’s a bit like a herd,” he continued.

The lot also said that they were very optimistic about the future as the e-grocery space was very vast and there were a lot of opportunities.

“70% of retail is food and groceries, so the space is enormous. Even if you capture 5% of it you will be worth a few billions,” said Gurgaon-based PepperTap’s Navneet Singh, “My belief is that because of the recent shake up (in the startup space), next year will see a greater concentration on scaling up and consolidation, but that is not to say that there won’t be new entrants. There will be, simply because of the sheer size and scope”

“It’s a long journey. The need for groceries always has and always will be there. My sense is that people will keep physically buying their groceries, people will keep calling and ordering from their local kiranas, and people will also order their groceries online,” said Vijay Singh.

As far as future plans go, most of the panel claimed that their respective companies’ main focus for the time being was on further scaling up and penetration within the Indian market itself, with no plans of international expansion in immediate sight.

“People in other countries have approached us looking at getting into joint venture. But this is something that we are not interested in,” said Choudhari.

Chayyos’s co-founder, Raghav Verma, who was also present on the panel, also said that his company was first looking at cracking the Indian market, making their presence in all the metro cities and moving into tier II and tier III towns, although they were confident that they could become an internationally successful brand.

“There is basically a huge potential in groceries. There will be more players and brick and mortar stores, too, might jump in,” said Choudhari, adding that their success will be reliant on identifying the specific customer segments they wish to capture and cater