Salt n Soap

Salt n Soap is an online grocery store and supermarket delivering packaged and fresh products of daily
needs. The e-store is owned and operated by blue beaks solutions and was founded in 2012. To
understand the importance of location analysis for an e-retail start up, we approached Salt n Soap
founder and CEO Prof. Dr Atanu Ghosh. Below are the insights from the discussion with him.

Order density predictions: When salt n soap decides on a trade area to service, they consider order
density in that particular area, which is predicted, based on the potential customers in the area. Salt
n soap chose salt lake area in Kolkata as the targeted customer (which are office going people mostly
working in the IT sector)

Price to Volume ratio: Service to a particular area also largely depends on the bill amount to volume
ratio. Since the logistics costs depends on the size of the order. To provide a continuous service in an
area the price to volume ratio should be good enough.

Road infrastructure: Presence of broad roads is convenient for delivery. In some narrow lanes its
difficult for the delivery van to pass through. So will need to split the aggregated delivery in an area to
smaller vehicles increasing the cost of operations.

Franchisee model: Initially the e-retail started by doing the procurement and delivery by itself but
later it shifted to franchisee model, where salt n soap gets into agreement with a supermarket to
handle a particular geographical area. So that they will take care of the
Conclusion

From the research, we conducted and from the interviews with employees from Flipkart, cloud tail,
Salt n Soap we can say that location analysis is relevant for e-retail companies. However, the location
analysis is different from that of brick and mortar store. For brick and mortar stores the popular
techniques used are based on distance and time to reach the store. Where as currently for e-tailers,
location analysis is mostly influenced by outbound logistics. For an e-retail company delivery time
tends to be a customer’s primary concern, since most e-retailers are able to compete on price in an
equal footing. So strategically locating