Taking advantage of this, a lot of middlemen come in to picture and the profit ratio that the SHG women should get is reduced to pennies. The major reason this situation arises is because of the lack of education and knowledge of the digital world amongst these workers.

The Government, in its initiative to take India to a new horizon, is taking new steps each day and a major focus is also laid on improving the lives of the rural parts and regions of the country.

Taking a step forward in this direction, the Rural Development Ministry of India has proposed to provide a wider market for the products manufactured by women Self Help Groups by listing them on the center’s e-commerce platforms, as revealed by the sources on Sunday. Not only that, the Government has also decided to take some more steps in this direction by providing all necessary support to SHG’s like branding, packaging, pricing, etc. to make the products more marketable.

With the proposal of this strategy, products made or manufactured by the SHG’s will just be a click away, same as Amazon, Flipkart or other e-commerce platforms. As per one of the senior officials of the ministry, the groups or the products will be listed on the center’s e-commerce portal, Government e-Marketplace (GeM).

“This step will help in a big way in making women in villages financially independent and in overall improvement of the rural economy, officials in the ministry said.”

If we look at the current statistics, there are approximately 58.5 lakh Self Help Groups under the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojna- National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM), with almost over 6 crore women as members or part of this mission.

It is expected that Ministries and Departments under the Central Government and Public Sector Undertakings (PSU’s) may start the procurement from the GeM platform which is currently managed by and is under the control of the Commerce Ministry.

Talking about GeM, it was launched back in August 2016 in order to increase transparency and efficiency in the process of public procurement. Currently, GeM has almost 3.36 lakh sellers doing business on the platform. Out of which 74,240 are small and micro sellers. And looking at the total transaction value so far it is somewhere around Rs. 47,612 crores.

As proposed by honorable finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, going forward, the expected increase in GeM’s turnover would be somewhere around Rs.3 Lakh Crores.

So, looking at all the proposals and the necessary steps taken by the Government, the proposal is expected to show a great boom in the Indian economy by making SHG’s digitally effective and allowing them to attract more audience/buyers that will automatically help raise the standard and condition of Rural India.

The post Products Made By Self-Help Groups To Be Listed On Centre’s E-Commerce Platform appeared first on Growthonomy.

Good enough! That’s the mentality most of us carry. But have you ever thought that even when you are purchasing from one particular shop for several years, what extra benefit did you get? Let’s leave the benefits aside and talk about do we even know about the competitor brands, what prices they are offering or what quality they are offering apart from the brands that our regular grocery seller has. No! Right?

When the entire economy has been digitalized, there is a transformation that is much needed for our nearby grocery stores as well. This visionary idea has laid a foundation for an eCommerce platform based in Bengaluru i.e. Near.Store which has successfully raised a seed funding of $300,000.

Ashish Kumar, founder of Near.Store said, “There is a huge potential for the right product, one that doesn’t need a change in behavior at the store. India has over 12 million kirana (corner) stores, which contribute to over 90% of the consumer goods sales, dwarfing both modern retail and online that together.”

Near.Store, is a plug & play based ecommerce platform for the offline stores and has raised a huge seed funding of $300,000 from Sauce.vc, an early stage consumer focused VC fund and also the other individual investors.

Near.Store will enable local stores to digitize their entire inventory online and develop new consumer base & relationships along with the access to business data and insights to make their business more effective and efficient.

The Near.Store is based on a unique platform wherein the only effort required from the store owner is to plug the Near.Store dongle device into their billing machines or mobile phone and the patent-pending platform i.e. Near.Store will automatically get the inventory online immediately. Once plugged in, the AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) algorithms, which are inbuilt in the platform take over and manage the various aspects of discovery (SEO), and hyper-local promotion of the store website.

“Most existing solutions are dependent on the mobile phone based apps, which make the process of going online very difficult and time consuming. In most scenarios, such products get abandoned by store-owners because of the cumbersome nature of their cataloging experience,” said the founder of Near.Store.

With the Headquarters based in Mumbai, Near.Store is led by an experienced team of three digital entrepreneurs who have unbeatable experience in the field of digital marketing, digital transformation and fin-tech. The Near.Store team has also been supported and appreciated by Shripad Nadkarni, ex-marketing head of Coca Cola and Johnson & Johnson, founder of Maverix Food Platforms and co-creator of the Paperboat and Epigamia Brands.

Mr. Manu Chandra, Founder of Sauce.vc said that “The Near.Store team has a deep and intrinsic understanding and knowledge of the Indian digital space and has a proven track record of creating and running successful companies and businesses. Local grocery/kirana stores are the mainstay of India’s CPG landscape and getting them digitalized in a zero effort manner holds a great potential for the entire retail ecosystem to help grow and expand the entire economy at a rapid pace.”

The post eCommerce Platform Near.Store Raises $300,000 Seed Fund appeared first on Growthonomy.