The e-commerce industry was growing rapidly but a time came in history when Kirana stores overpowered e-commerce giants. It was the Covid-19 pandemic that jolted the economy and e-commerce was one of the worst-hit sectors of retail businesses.

What is a Kirana store?

Kirana store can be considered as a small grocery shop in your area. It can be owned by a single owner or it can be a family business. They mostly work on the credit system. They get the supplies from the distributors in credit and return the credit after selling the product.

 In rough stats, Kirana owners make around 16-18% profit annually by doing the business locally. There are more than 6.65 million Kirana stores across the country and have over 90% of share in the Indian retail market.

Structure of the Indian Retail Market

As we know, the structures of the Kirana or Parchun shop chains are mostly unorganized in India. Most of the revenue comes from these Parchun shops which are an integral part of the Indian Economy. The organized retail sector holds over 165 billion dollars of market share. The total value of Indian retail is worth 600 billion dollars.

Even after the emergence of e-commerce online retailers, the offline market has a stronghold on the Indian retail economy. Let’s see further how dependency on the Kirana store works in this country.

Dependence on Kirana Shops (Parchun shops)

The majority of Indian customers are depending upon local general stores or Parchun Shops for daily essentials. Food products are mainly distributed by small Parchun shops across the community. This is very difficult for online giants like Grofers, Flipkart, Amazon, etc. to establish a customer belief in a very short time. Kirana stores are providing over 13 million people their wages.

Impact of technology on Kirana and Parchun Industry

After the arrival of retail giants like Reliance and Grofers, Kirana stores are getting converted into their own branded outlets. Grofers have converted 200 Kirana stores to their own outlet. Idea is to maintain consistency over the unstructured layout of the stores in the country.

Reliance is planning to convert 5 million Kirana stores by 2023. This is a huge interference to the Indian retail market. Indian retail market is changing but according to Forbes India, Parchun and Kirana stores are going to stay here in India for some considerable amount of time.

Effect of Pandemic on the retail Industry

During the COVID-19 pandemic, services got hampered directly as mobility was restricted for the sake of people’s safety. People were not allowed to get out of their houses and it was necessary to provide daily essentials to the consumers. This was the time when Kirana stores played an important role in proving the essential products to the people.

Kirana stores were allowed to open during the lockdown period where online services were banned. Online giants were asked to provide essential services to the customers, which didn’t happen effectively during the lockdown period.

Kirana and Parchun Stores – A Lifeline during Lockdown

When demands of food items suddenly increased during the lockdown period, Kirana stores served as a life savior for the retail industry in India. People were asked for social distancing and traveling was not allowed.

People were allowed to go out for emergency services only. At that time people found these Kirana stores in their neighborhood for essential food item supply. Kirana stores turned out to be a lifeline during this pandemic.

Let’s dig more into how Kirana stores turned out to be a life savior for over 1.38 billion people in this emergency situation.

5 Reasons why Kirana Stores overpowered eCommerce giants

1. Better connectivity
2. Better Availability of essential items
3. The Comfort zone of Indian Customers
4. Ease of doing business
5. Government’s interference during the lockdown – The restrictions

1. Better connectivity of Kirana stores

When we talk about the structure of the retail industry in India, Parchun Shops prove to be the most visited place for the purchase of daily essentials. This happens due to its better connectivity to the local residents. People find it easier to go out and purchase grocery items from these Parchun shops rather than going to a relatively complicated system of e-commerce grocery purchases.

2. Better Availability of essential items

During the period of lockdown, e-commerce giants got overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand for essential items. It was impossible to fulfill the needs of customers once at the same time. At that time essentials were available at the local Kirana outlets which have a very vast network across the country.

People found it easier to go the traditional way. As the demand didn’t overwhelm the large network of outlets, the demand got distributed and thus Kirana stores became more effective during the lockdown period.

3. The Comfort zone of Indian Customers

E-commerce is relatively new to the Indian retail market. People are not used to buying essential items from any retail platform working online. Retail businesses are trust-based businesses that run on retail’s relation with their customers.

During the pandemic, people went for the local Kirana shops to buy essential products. Even today, people find it comfortable to buy products from local markets rather than buying it online. This made Kirana stores more effective than online stores during this pandemic.

4. Ease of doing business of Kirana stores.

E-commerce businesses run on a wider area with an integration of multiple service providers. This makes the process of delivering the ordered product longer than the Kirana shops. A product reaches its customers after lots of processing. This makes the delivery costly as well as time-consuming.

In the case of shopping through a Kirana store, geographical distances are negligible which makes it easier to get the orders instantly. A Kirana store is easily accessible and due to zero interference of third party bodies, services are easily availed at a very convenient rate.

5. Government’s interference during the lockdown

During the lockdown, e-commerce services were restricted to essential items only, whereas offline stores were able to provide non-essential items as well. This gave an extra amount of favor to the Kirana store services to do daily businesses.

Lockdown forced people to remain in their houses. The e-commerce delivery services were unable to deliver the ordered products because of the restrictions. Kirana stores had the permission to continue their services amid lockdown. Parchun shops also provided home delivery to the people in their locality. This made Kirana shops more helpful to the customers amid lockdown.

Future of Kirana and Parchun Stores in India

Indian retail Industry is digitalizing and local Parchun Shops are getting converted into branded supply chains. This has a significant impact on the traditional way of selling good and daily essentials. India has the second-largest population of internet users. This creates a great opportunity for the technology giants to sink in.

E-commerce giants are already on a move to digitalize the Indian retail Industry. Recently Facebook and Reliance made a $5.7 billion deal to enhance the Jio Mart project in India. Jio mart is an ambitious project of RIL to provide an online-to-offline platform to the customers. Idea is to connect all local Kirana or Parchun Shops to the customers through an online platform without losing the benefits of an offline store.

In short, a customer can place an order online and purchase offline. This will have support with Whatsapp which has 20 crore customers which will connect 3 crore Kirana stores to the customers. This will have a great impact on Kirana stores. Currently, Jio Mart is available in some parts of Maharashtra and expected to be available across the country very soon.

Conclusion

Hence Kirana stores overpowered e-commerce giants in this rare cause of an event. This came as a life savior for people locked in their houses. Kirana stores have a history in India and it’s not going anywhere for some considerable amount of time. It is true that technology will have an impact on the retail industry in India, but the traditional way of selling groceries will not vanish.

Kirana stores are evolving rather than getting extinct. This is very early to come to any conclusion. Things are changing rapidly but we cannot deny the fact that change is the only constant and Indian Retail Industry is on its move. With the change, Kirana stores are holding their position as the lynchpin of the Indian retail industry.

You may also want to see:

• List of Kirana Stores in Noida providing home delivery!

The post Time in History when Kirana Stores overpowered e-commerce giants appeared first on Growthonomy.

COVID-19 and Wuhan – The Commercial Capital

In order to prevent and control the spread of Novel Coved-19, Chinese Government imposed a full lockdown on Jan 23, 2020 in the city of Wuhan. All major roads and highways were blocked as a reason of the same and approximately 11 million citizens were placed in quarantine that lasted for an unexpected duration of 60 days.

Various severe challenges were imposed because of this lockdown. As Wuhan is considered as the circulatory system of the entire retail sector. Be it groceries or everyday supplies. And the lockdown acted as a barrier wherein the people were cut off from the communities and were locked up in their homes/apartments.

Soon after the declaration of the lockdown the first situation that came up was panic buying from the local stores. In order to prevent themselves from the risk of contamination arising out of contamination.

During this situation two biggest retail giants of china accepted the challenge to keep the quarantined residents supplied with all the necessary items during the isolation days. High degree of innovation and flexibility was seen in terms of skills, processes along with range of products and services offered.

Technology Transformation By Alibaba

With the help of its digital logistics platform, Alibaba became the first one to take a huge move in this direction. With rapid fast market understanding Alibaba identified and contacted all the major quality manufacturing partners, which reopened the mask and other medical supply units during the time of Chinese New Year.

Alibaba offered fast track shipping and tracking of all the critical supplies such as face masks, hand sanitizers and other essential supplies at best prices through its B2C and C2C marketplace.

Alibaba Didn’t stop here, with the help of its digital payment system named Alipay, they were able to collect a huge donation amounting to $1 million alone in the very first 8 hours.

When it comes to physical delivery and distribution, Alibaba’s Cainiao Network and its competitor JD.com are already in process of experimenting new automated technologies in a bid achieving an edge over Western rivals Amazon and Alphabet. 

Innovative Solution By JD.com Played An Important Role In Fighting COVID-19

If we talk about the examples, in 2018, JD.com had tested delivery in remote areas through drones, driverless smart vehicles etc.

After the lockdown was imposed, the first challenge that was faced by digital retailers was: Increasing the delivery capacity without moving manpower into the province?

Coming up with a solution JD.com and few other retailers deployed their new automated technology. Smart vehicles with loaded maps were remotely operated to deliver donated goods to hospitals and household communities.

The empty streets contributed to this experiment. Along with empowering the retailers to cope up with demand hikes without violating the Government laid policies and guidelines.

Major Challenge Faced By The eCommerce Giants:

As major roads and highways were blocked, it was a challenging task to deliver goods and essential items to remote areas affected by virus. Delivery to some remote areas that were still connected by small roads and ferries were consuming time up to 6 hours.

Here JD’s team came up with a creative and innovative idea of delivery using drones, which completed the task effectively in just 20 minutes.

Lockdown resulted in a huge demand of daily essential such as rice, flour, fruits, vegetables and other items. As a result of the same there was a huge transformation from offline to online stores. Which led to shortage of human resources to monitor these supply chains.

Smart Move by Freshippo (Grocery Subsidiary of Alibaba) & 7Fresh (branch of JD.com)

Grocery subsidiary of Alibaba named Freshippo, confronted the challenge by asking workers from shuttered restaurants and retail outlets to staff the supply chain and hiring them

JD.com’s 7Fresh branch quickly followed the suit. And in a short span of time were able to leverage these workers and had to provide them with least knowledge and skills in terms of e-commerce context.

Further leveraging the opportunity, 7Fresh significantly increased the production of ready to cook items with the help of the temporary catering staff that they have hired.

Similarly, MTDP, a super-app restaurant delivery platform came forward to offer its services for the delivery of everyday supplies by partnering with over more than 7,000 brick-and-mortar supermarkets to process digital orders and deliver to individual households.

Contact Less Deliveries:

Delivery workers are most prone to this situation as they are the one who will interact and get in touch with the consumer base. Putting their health at stake and may act as a vector in transmitting the virus.

In order to further reduce and minimize the risks, JD.com and Alibaba both took all the necessary steps like equipping their employees with facial masks, gloves and disinfectants.

Not only that further safety processes were incorporated in their routine, such as temperature checks, mandate disinfection after each delivery and final drop off.

The last mile delivery, which required customer signatures before drop off also proved to be major area of concern for the e-commerce giants as customers refused to accept the orders because of interaction with the delivery personnel and gated communities also refused the entry.

In order to overcome this situation, JD.com placed delivery boxes outside the gated communities and after placing the order in the box a QR code is sent to consumer informing the delivery of the item and requesting the receipt.

Other Initiatives By Alibaba To Fight COVID-19

AliHealth also got pace during this time, providing Covid-19 information through Taobao and Alipay. As the situation started getting worse, it started offering free online consultation on their platform.

As the businesses and Government of the entire world came on to the foot front to defeat the Covid-19 situation, the rapid success of Chinese e-commerce giants and their strategy is teaching the entire world, how to be tech savvy and access mass markets.

The post How Innovation Helped Alibaba Soar High Even During 60-day COVID-19 Lockdown appeared first on Growthonomy.

With a recent announcement made by one of the innovative robotics pioneer Soft Robotics Inc. regarding the launch of a specially designed solution for handling the major problem of product return by the end-users.

The SuperPick Polybag Picking System, which can be considered as an extension to the SuperPick platform is a highly effective and efficient new age end to end robotic material handling technology. That majorly focuses to provide e-commerce industry operations an ability that will allow them to automate the scanning, handling, and loading of the outbound orders and returns of polybagged items by the customers.

The SuperPick Polybag Picking System is the latest offering from the Soft Robotics SuperPick platform. All SuperPick solutions have been specially crafted to reduce dissipated material handling challenges in the market that is labor starved and can easily be integrated with a variety of applications across the globe.

Comprising of ultra-fast 3D vision with the state of art gripping technology, the SuperPick Polybag Picking System caters to the items including those with even the highest degree of variability. The turnkey system has been specifically designed for order fulfillment and return processing of the items in polybags or in self-sealing mailer bags.

These capable and durable plastic bags have become the preferred packaging method/choice in the e-commerce industry because of the lower shipping costs versus cardboard boxes.

Handling the different variety and the nature of unstructured items in polybags has always been a challenge that traditional automation systems have not been able to reliably address.

The SuperPick Polybag system has successfully overcome these challenges and with multiple benefits i.e. to handle multiple SKUs without re-programming or time-consuming, eliminating complex training.

It can easily pick, scan, and deliver identified products that may vary in size, shape, fragility, and weight to any material handling system in the market.

“Reverse logistics and returns handling have become the center of attention for many e-commerce companies as recent studies have shown that 41% of people who purchase items online do so with the intention of returning at least some part of their order. This problem is only getting worse day by day as consumers continue to increase their volume of online shopping each year,” said Carl Vause, CEO of Soft Robotics.

“We’ve introduced such an innovative automation solution that will not only address the complexity and variability in the unstructured environment of the reverse flow of merchandise, but will prove to be an end to end solution for the order fulfillment process.”

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