If the Sunday schedule of the domesticated & homely types in the species called “Husbands” could be stereotyped, then it would be definitely something like this:
Early Morning: The husband prepares the morning tea
Morning: The husband prepares the breakfast
Mid-day: The husband goes grocery & vegetable shopping and runs a few local shopping errands
Afternoon: Who cares? Sundays are never fun!
And here comes Grofers – The super-saviour of Sundays for the husbands who have never enjoyed one.
In our last Million Dollar Idea evaluation, we had mentioned about Grofers. So, this time around, we went about analysing the idea.
To answer this, we first need to explain you what Grofers is all about. First, Grofers is not just about grocery or vegetable shopping. There are a lot of grocery shopping apps available in the market. What makes Grofers different is that it an app for local shopping. So, it’s not just groceries you shop for. You shop for a lot more. Like currently, the app offers grocery, vegetables, meat, flowers & bakery products and has multiple merchants listed in each category. So you could pick Dunkin Donuts for bakery, Reliance Fresh for your grocery and some local shop for your veggies & meat. So, Grofers is pretty much the seamless mall offering various local merchants all under one roof.
So, do we like it? Yes – we love it. The idea is indeed a good solution to a real need which is to avoid visiting 4-5 different shops to complete your Sunday shopping list. Grofers saves energy, saves petrol and most importantly, saves time!
Grofers clearly facilitates. Of what we could guess & understand, any local merchant or brand could list with Grofers. And once listed, the brand starts getting connected with the customers. Even if we are to play the devil’s advocate here, then the only restrictions we could think of are the terms & conditions of Grofers and the IT readiness of the brand wanting to get listed. Beyond this, we feel that the model is highly facilitative.
Yes and on two levels. The first is for the customers – simply put, Grofers brings in convenience of local shopping from home. What makes the app delightful is the fact that it delivers in under 2 hours. That’s true local shopping experience, completely different from the traditional 3 day e-commerce delivery that Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon and other biggies have gotten us accustomed to. The second is for the retailers. We don’t see that a few retailers, such as Sodhi Super Market (listed for a few localities in Gurgaon), listed with the app would even have going e-commerce on their agenda. So from both the demand & supply aspect, this is what we call believe is being truly effective.
Very much. All the app needs to do is get local merchants & brands listed with it. The only hitch here is that the app will need to list shops for every few kilometres in each city. So for Gurgaon, it might need to have atleast one grocery shop listed for every 4 sectors. This could make scalability a little time consuming, but definitely not impossible.
We have not come across similar apps till now. Yes, we have come across many grocery shopping e-commerce vendors. My Green Box, Local Banya, Big Basket, Ek Stop, Pepper Tap are quite known. But none of them offer seamless shopping across different local merchants and brands. So we did like to think of Grofers as unique and a first entrant.
Commission from the merchants. On the expenses side, operational aspects of deliveries beyond the merchant premises, the manpower involved for the same, the marketing of the app and other expenses are the major heads. The commissions from merchants could be paper thin and managing all the expenses with these thin margins could be a challenge. But never the less, the revenue model is quite clear and could definitely be tweaked if the need be to generate more health earnings.
We are a hundred percent convinced about it being a million dollar idea. The success of this digital business will depend on various other factors, one of which is good funding at regular intervals. If Grofers manages to do that, we definitely have a champion in the making.
Great job Team Groffers! We did like to see you go faster and emerge a prominent player in the Indian e-Commerce scene.
PS: Grofers currently operates in many localities of Delhi-NCR, Mumbai & Bengaluru.
