For the first time in India, AaramShop brings together, through its Mobile App, the location advantage of the Neighbourhood Kirana Stores, information on Deals & Discounts at the Kirana Stores, the inventory of the store, and ability to order with a few clicks of button.
The AaramShop App promises to revolutionize grocery buying in India by providing the customer the following key benefits:
- Convenience of making her shopping list on the AaramShop App – This is particularly important because grocery buying is shopping list driven and the products in the list do not change significantly over a period of time.
- Explore and redeem the offers and deals available with her trusted neighbourhood store
- Order the household needs and get them home delivered within time unmatched by anybody else in the grocery eco-system
The opportunity in India lies in how the FMCG retail environment is shaping up. Kirana stores still make up more than 90% of India’s FMCG sales, and this dominance is likely to continue for the foreseeable future because of their unique offerings including convenience, credit and offers, high real estate prices, difficult traffic conditions in large cities, and high density of Kirana stores.
“Every household has their preferred neighborhood store. We want to ensure that the shopper can carry her preferred store within her mobile at all times.” Say Vijay Singh, the CEO & MD of AaramShop, the organization that is helping the retailers with this transition.
“We are just making an already convenient process even more convenient and adding transparency to it”, says Singh. No one can beat the convenience, the speed of delivery and the customized assortment that the neighborhood grocer has. However, one really does not know what the store has available and the cost of the same. That’s where the mobile app is of great use.
AaramShop is using its unique hybrid platform to enable consumers across the country to explore the specialized inventory of their preferred retailers, along with their special offers and promotions. Updates are made available to the consumers within the catchment area on a real time basis.
In the 1st phase the consumers have access to their store preferred stores via AaramShop’s android app, however, the app will be soon available on all devices. The app currently enables access to over 5000 grocery stores across 42 Indian cities.
For the consumer: The following are the key pain points that a typical FMCG customer has when she buys from a Kirana store:
- Lack of information about deals and offers in the store – While the customer shops at the store for convenience, she lacks information on the offers and deals available at the store.
- The constrained space of a store doesn’t provide the browsing experience of the Modern store. This, again, tends to limit the neighbourhood store buying to the bare essentials and the immediate needs.
For the Store owner, the AaramShop Mobile App for customers, combined with the AaramShop Store App to help him manage his store, is a tremendous force multiplier. The Store owner now has the means to inform all of his customers on their apps about his deals and offers. He has the ability to start using technology as a CRM tool, something that was till now considered the preserve of the Modern Trade, and required significant investments. Now he can record customer details, and inform, educate and reward his customers consistently. All of this combines with his unsurpassable strengths in delivery, credit, and the unique ability to cater to local tastes.
What makes the AaramShop Mobile App of particular interest is that it also provides answers to another conundrum that the customer faces when she calls the retailer on the phone to order. Given the constraints that a retailer has, picking the phone in time is itself an area of pain. Further, while the customers would like to get better and faster customer service, there is always going to be a constraint on the number of phones lines that a retailer can have to cater to the rapidly increasing home order business. The combination of AaramShop Apps for the customers and the Kirana stores helps relieve these constraints as well.
