India is home to more than 12 million retail stores, of which around 11 million cater to the Grocery segment. These traditional local grocery stores are also known as “Kirana” stores in Hindi or “Dinasi Angadi” in Kannada and also have many local names in various local languages across India. The local grocery shops or Kirana stores are categorised as unorganised retail sector as they operate on lower scale, with little to no standardisation of selling goods with focus on local customers within a small geographical area. Lower scale also renders it unattractive for the local Kirana stores to adapt technologies for their operations and standardise their process.
These local grocery shops called as provision stores, departmental stores, general stores or Kirana stores are deeply rooted in the Indian local economy landscape and enjoy around 85% of the market share, while the organised sector, comprising of large established retail chains and hyper markets, occupying around 14% of the Market and the remaining 1% being occupied by the ecommerce sector.
Although, collectively the Kirana stores still have a large market share in the grocery segment, they are losing their market share to the new players and new market dynamics. Just a decade ago the Kirana Stores used to enjoy more than 95% of the market share, which is now reduced by more than 10% due to the growth of organised retail sectors with huge capital access to scale and the ecommerce players with strong technological edge and online reach.
The recent Covid-19 pandemic was also a major blow to the local grocery stores as they were forced to remain closed due to the local administration-imposed lockdown restrictions. This further gave a major impetus to Ecommerce at the cost of the market share of the local Kirana stores and grocery shops. In addition to that, the post pandemic world is not seeing an onset of many quick commerce players entering not just the grocery segment but also other segments like pharmacies and fresh meat and many more. All these new market dynamics are set to further accelerate the disruption of the Kirana Stores as the consumer behaviour around grocery buying is also changing radically. Hence it is vitally important that the local Kirana stores and Grocery shops are also gearing up to fight this disruption to guard their market position while catering to the changing market behaviour.
However, a major challenge for these local Kirana stores or grocery stores to be part of the online commerce and fight the disruption is their lack of technical skills and also lack of monetary resources to scale their operations. Therefore, it is important that these local grocery stores and retailers are empowered to take part in the ecommerce game, without they needing to invest heavily to scale or on technical skills and this is what Santhe.in aims to do. The local Kirana stores or local grocery shop merchants can easily download, install and register on the Santhe Merchant mobile app in less than 3 minutes and that’s all they have to do to gain access to customers via online channel. Once they are registered on the Santhe Merchant app, they would get notified whenever a customer in their locality has shared their grocery shopping lists. Now the local grocery shops or Kirana stores owners can easily bid on that entire shopping list and make their best offer. Once the customer accepts an offer, the grocery stores who made the offer will be notified of the same and connected with the customer to agree on next steps like product delivery and payment. Thus, the local grocery shop has now won a new customer and the customers has received the best deal for their grocery buying.
Santhe aims to empower the local Kirana stores and local grocery shop merchants by allowing them to easily and competitively participate in the online commerce and thus retain and grow their market share.
If you are an Owner of a Kirana store or a local Grocery store or mini market or Supermarket, you can now participate easily in online commerce by installing and using the FREE Santhe Merchant App using the below links.
References:
- Why is Retail Sector Unorganised in India ??? | YRC (yourretailcoach.in)
- India 2 Minutes Meal To 10 Minutes Delivery-Srinath Sridharan – BW Businessworld
- Coronavirus: From retailers to e-tailers! global lessons India’s Kirana stores can learn to aid lockdown life – BusinessToday
- Disrupting the Retail Space with Quick Commerce – Purple Quarter
- The state of grocery retail in India | McKinsey
- Tech-Savvy Kiranas: The Way Forward for Retail in India (indianretailer.com)
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