‘SHOPPERS WILL CONTINUE SUPPORTING KIRANAS WHILE USING E-COMM'

As the retail industry grapples with the Pandemic induced lockdown blues, technology is fast emerging as the bridge that connects consumption and selling. Indeed, many tech led enablers have helped small retailers get their business back into action, while catering to shopper needs.

- Ashish Kumar

Near.store is a plug and play hyper local platform for physical/offline stores to enable online store. A shop owner simply needs to plug in the Near.Store dongle into their existing bar-code scanner/ billing system. The device does not require any additional internet connection, software, electricity or lengthy implementation process. The platform has enabled 4 housing societies in Mumbai to place their orders and get deliveries from the next-door Kirana store. The four societies are Mantri Park and Mansarovar at Goregoan and Beach Towers and Prabha Nagar in South Mumbai. To place an order, the residents can simply log on to the shop’s link created by Near.Store platform. The company says that in less than 3 days of launch, it has enabled more than 150 orders across the platform. To ensure social distancing precautions, the shop owners deliver all orders once a day. Ashish Kumar - Co-founder, Near Store, shares with Point Of Purchase more details on on the solution.

Could you take us through the whole process of creating near.store? How long did it take? What were the initial challenges? tail?

The Indian Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry is changing rapidly and unorganised retail is still a large part of total sales. There are over 12 million plus offline local stores, chemists etc who are experiencing the impact of ecommerce and changing consumer behaviour. Despite being the closest to the customer physically they were starting to lose business. While they understood the need to go online, the challenges of building a website, investing in technology, staff and executing online orders made it very difficult for smaller stores to adapt.