Over a period of last 10 years, online grocery shopping has become a popular way for people to save time and money while getting their groceries. With online grocery shopping, customers can order their groceries online and have them delivered right to their doorstep. This eliminates the need to drive to the store, wait in lines, or even worry about having enough cash on hand. Online grocery stores offer convenience and flexibility by allowing customers to shop from the comfort of their own homes. In addition, they offer the lure of competitive prices and a good selection of products that can be ordered with just a few clicks.

With this in mind, it’s no wonder why more people are turning to online grocery shopping as an easy and convenient way to get what they need.
Within the realms of online grocery shopping there are different variants of the business models which are currently in operation. Any tech savvy customer in India is now experiencing and benefiting from these different offerings. Largely the new age online grocery shopping can be grouped as follows.
- Online Grocery Retailers: These are the traditional online retailers who would deliver the products ordered online within a certain delivery window spanning from couple of days to a week. They are also venturing into the online grocery segment by offering to deliver groceries the same day or the next day. However, these general online retailers are setup mainly for large scale operations and not optimized for hyper local online grocery retailing.
- Quick Commerce Online Grocery Retailers: As against the giant general online retailers, these new players in the market are offering quick grocery delivery ranging from 10 minutes to 30 minutes. Despite a wide spread criticism of these quick commerce online grocery businesses putting lives of delivery workers at risk, they have managed to gain good momentum, especially among those segments of customers who are from a family setup wherein both the spouses are working and have very little time to plan and buy groceries.
All above online grocery shopping models have gained good momentum and are redefining the grocery buying behavior in India. All these models that are prevalent now are in fact copycat of the ones that were established in the developed western countries. Although there are two important aspects of the Indian grocery market that sets us apart from the western countries.
- Indian grocery marker is still largely served by the various forms of local grocery stores called as local provision stores, general stores, departmental stores or Kirana stores. These small grocery shops are currently being disrupted by the online grocery shopping offerings.
- Indian grocery customers and consumers is still largely constituted by the segment that are planned grocery buyers. These are usually the families, wherein the lady of the family is usually writing down a list of groceries that she would buy from local grocery stores and supermarkets at regular intervals like one a week, biweekly etc.
Recognising the above traits, we, the team Santhe have come with a unique model of online grocery shopping experience via our Santhe Apps. Customers can use the Santhe App to easily create a grocery shopping list and wherever ready to make a purchase, the list can be easily sent to local grocery shops and supermarkets nearby. The local grocery shops and supermarkets that are registered on the Santhe Merchant App can then easily add their prices, discounts and deals to the and make an offer to the customer. The customer can now compare the different offers from different local grocery shops and choose the offer that suits them best. Thus, Santhe aims to redefine the way the customers in India can buy grocery online in a more inclusive model by connecting local customers with local grocery shops and super markets.