11/27/2018 ShopKirana Aims To Devour The Kirana Store Woes Like A Piranha - Inc42 Media

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STARTUP 101

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11/27/2018 ShopKirana Aims To Devour The Kirana Store Woes Like A Piranha - Inc42 Media

A persistent problem is going unaddressed with no 50+ Startup Schemes

By The Indian
one in the ecosystem trying to solve it. That’s the cue
Government That
for many an entrepreneur to make their entry with Startups Should
startups which would provide the panacea. In early Know...

2015, three young entrepreneurs – Sumit Ghorawat, By Meha A.  30 Jun'17 

73 min read
Deepak Dhanotiya and Tanutejas Saraswat took the
unaddressed woes of kirana stores (mom-and-pop
stores) as their cue to enter the world of startups with
ShopKirana.

Sumit was appalled by the long turnaround time that

Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and other
brands took while meeting the demands of kirana
stores. A graduate from Carnegie Mellon University,
Sumit was working with Procter & Gamble when he
made the observation that  it took a kirana store
owner almost 10-15 days to replenish the exhausted
stock of branded products. So, for instance, if any
brand of soap or shampoo went out of stock at a
kirana store, the shopkeeper had to wait for almost a
fortnight before fresh stock was made available.

Typically, a sales executive from a FMCG brand

would visit every kirana store and take the supplies
order on a piece of paper.  He would then go back to
the brand’s o ce and enter the orders into the
system, against the name of each kirana store. The
systems department would update the inventory
team of distributors and then they, in turn, would
deliver the supplies on behalf of the brand to the
stores. The entire process, from placing an order to
delivery of the supplies, would take approximately 10
days. To avoid the delay, a kirana storekeeper would,
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11/27/2018 ShopKirana Aims To Devour The Kirana Store Woes Like A Piranha - Inc42 Media

therefore pre-order for goods in advance before the

stock got over.

At P&G, Sumit was working with Deepak, whose

father owned a kirana store. Deepak knew the agony
of managing inventory. In the era of technology and
smartphone penetration, it was a surprise that
unorganised retail market, which made up for 92% of
the $300 Bn market economy, was still following the
traditional path. They regularly deliberated on
methods of solving  this problem by reducing the
turnaround time to just 24 hours. Their discussions
sowed the seed of a concept, when the duo met
Tanutejas, a business graduate from Proton Business
School. The concept metamorphised into a startup
called ShopKirana.

ShopKirana, a B2B M-distribution platform for

merchants and small retailers came to being in early
2015 in Indore.

“In India, retail still follows the traditional route of a

supply chain. Around 92% of the retail industry is
unorganised that presented a huge opportunity for
us. Having watched the retail sector so closely, we
could understand the pain points of the sector,” says
Sumit.

Related Article: ShopKirana Raises Funding From

Japan’s Incubate Fund, Others

https://inc42.com/startups/shopkirana-story/ 3/17
11/27/2018 ShopKirana Aims To Devour The Kirana Store Woes Like A Piranha - Inc42 Media

ShopKirana Is Not
About Shopping
ShopKirana is a B2B mobile application tailored for
retailers.  Using the swipe and select option on the
app, the kirana shop owners can select items, feed
the quantity required for each item and then place an
order to their brands. The order gets simultaneously
re ected on the automated systems of the brands
and ShopKirana. ShopKirana’s delivery boys pick up
the ordered items  from the brands and deliver them
to the kirana shops, thereby cutting down on the time
lapse between demand and supply. Apart from taking
orders, the app generates data about top selling
brands, monthly usage, order patterns and more.

ShopKirana aims to connect the 9 Mn kirana stores to

brands, bringing the traditional retailers and brands
on the same digital platform. It is the marriage of
online and o ine retail models.

Business Model
ShopKirana works on an asset-light model, wherein it
follows an on-demand pick and drop  model, and
doesn’t own any inventory. However, it has
established ful llment centers for material collection,
sorting, and packaging. At present, ShopKirana is
only targeting the grocery, food and beverages
industry that accounts for 60% of the overall market.
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11/27/2018 ShopKirana Aims To Devour The Kirana Store Woes Like A Piranha - Inc42 Media

Since its inception, ShopKirana has connected over

2000 retailers to 23 brands. During July-August, it
made entry into Mumbai. It has three sourcing
hubs/ful llments centers; two in Indore and one in
Mumbai. In just ve months, it has ful lled about
12,000 orders, delivering over 4 lakh products. A
few of the top brands that ShopKirana has gotten on
board include  Parle, Fortune, Daawat, Bisleri and
Britannia.

ShopKirana’s revenue comes from the commission it

 takes from the brands for the products sold/delivered
to kirana stores. It also provides value-added services
like logistics, banking and loan etc.. Apart from this,
the founders of are also  trying to build alliances with
brands to capitalise on Shopkirana’s network of
Kirana stores and earn revenue. Any brands, in and
around Indore are reaching out to ShopKirana for
promotion. A namkeen (salty snacks) brand in Indore
that wants to enter the Mumbai market is using the
ShopKirana network and platform for product launch
and marketing.

The ShopKirana founders  are also in talks with Uber

for a promotional campaign in Indore. Uber has
generated unique codes for some 1000 retailers in
Indore. The retailers and ShopKirana would get a
commission for every download that comes from the
unique codes created for the retailer. “Uber wants to
expand in Indore and they are using our network to
reach out to the customers. All that the retailers have
to do is promote the app to their customer by asking
them to download it using the code,” Sumit informed.
https://inc42.com/startups/shopkirana-story/ 5/17
11/27/2018 ShopKirana Aims To Devour The Kirana Store Woes Like A Piranha - Inc42 Media

Though the larger vision is to touch over 9Mn

retailers in long term, for the next few months, they
have set the the target to reach out to at least 8000
kirana stores in Mumbai and Indore. The trio is also
mulling entry into a third city. On product
development side, they look to adding more analytics
to the app. The next generation of the app would
have dashboards that generate reports on sales,
footfall, pro t, inventory and more.

Market And
Competitive
Landscape
The Boston Consulting Group and Retailers
Association of India (RAI) in a report, ‘Retail 2020:
Retrospect, Reinvent, Rewrite’, stated that retail
market is expected to nearly double in ve years,
touching $1 Tn by 2020 from $600 Bn as of today.
Another report by Euro Monitor highlighted that in
2014, grocery retail business grew by over 11%.

While there are no competitors in the market among

the startups in the same space of B2B connect,
ShopKirana faces competition from major software
giants like SAP, Oracle and other order management
and retail CRM/ERP software that hold sway over the
brands. The FMCG majors, on the other hand, are
seeking to cut down on the turnaround time by
providing tablets to the mobile sales team, who visit
https://inc42.com/startups/shopkirana-story/ 6/17
11/27/2018 ShopKirana Aims To Devour The Kirana Store Woes Like A Piranha - Inc42 Media

kirana stores to take the orders, so that they could

feed it to the company’s systems in real-time.

However, there are many players in the B2C space

like Bigbasket, Zopper, Ji store that connect the
kirana stores to the end-customers.

Editor’s Note:
While ShopKirana is not a full- edged distributor,
since it does not stock and sell, the startup still weigh
heavy on many the large regional distributors.

ShopKirana holds promise of huge growth in the

niche area and also has a scope for  good acquisition,
for FMCG brands. But the basic premise for the
success of this model is mobile and Internet. In a
country where 236 Mn people use internet on mobile
and with internet penetration of just 19%, we are only
considering the big retailers in urban areas. This
limits the reach and potential of the model. In the
past, many tech rms tried piloting SMS-based order
solution for their FMCG clients, but failed. How
ShopKirana overcomes this hurdle remains to be
seen.

B2B Shopkirana Startup Story

Startups

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously.

More information about it can be found here.

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11/27/2018 ShopKirana Aims To Devour The Kirana Store Woes Like A Piranha - Inc42 Media

Author
Akanksha Prasad
Inc42 Sta

Akanksha Prasad has been a journalist for more than

seven years writing about IT, ITES. She likes to dissect
every piece of information and analyze it, connecting
to the larger story. After avid blogger and music
enthusiast, she is now all ears to know the startups.

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