Exclusive | Driven by consumer relationship: MyGrahak's Ambuj Jhunjhunwala

MyGrahak.com Shopping Online. is an online store. Ambuj Jhunjhunwala CEO of the store took a major transformational step by changing the nature of product sales from ‘transactional’ to relationship driven’ by establishing MyGrahak.com as a strong entrant in the e-grocery retail market within one year of its inception.

 

Ambuj Jhunjhunwala is a management graduate from Singapore Management University. His major interests lie in internet, finance, consumerism which he keeps exploring for greater know how.

Team Adgully met up with him to learn more about his project and their success story. 

 

Regarding the project Ambuj Jhunjhunwala, CEO of online store MyGrahak.com said that his is an online supermarket and the intention was to give people within metros an option and luxury of buying groceries on line from home. Nowadays the trend is to buy from various shops as the need arises. But MyGrahak consolidates and gives people the convenience of buying various products from one single place that too at a click or call. They offer free home deliveries to facilitate this and try to price themselves slightly below market prices. The customer gets convenience, a wide range of products and that too at a better price. All this is facilitated through the use of technology online which helps them to centralize and become more efficient than other sources of offline retail. The project was started in December 2010 and has seen a good response since the past year . He said that they have more than 20,000 families buying from them on a monthly basis. The growth rate is 20-25% on a month to month basis. As of now this online store is a Delhi NCR based player. But 5-6 months down the line post establishment of the concept and once they prove that they can scale up within a city they look forward to expanding. Their next markets would be Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune and some more markets which they would like to go towards the end of this fiscal.

There were challenges after the launch. He said that the belief in this concept was one hurdle.  Given that this is a new model the supply team infra was not geared up so they had to gear up their own supply team infra and these were the largest two challenges he faced in the beginning.

 

According to him Gurgaon, Noida and Ghaziabad are included in the NCR at present. Elaborating on the delivery system to such places he said that they have a centralized warehouse system where all the products are delivered, packed and processed. Then they are loaded on delivery vans. Once they move to different cities they are prepared to adopt to different distribution models.

It is definitely a luxury to get products delivered at the door step but were people not apprehensive about the quality of the product? To this he said the customer was more than geared up.  Till date they have not faced any challenges from the customer’s acquisition point.  Initially skepticism did play a role but people have greeted this service with a lot of excitement. Deliveries are done mostly within 48 hours with 20%-25% of them are carried out in 24 hours based on the time of ordering in the day.

 

MyGrahak Shopping Online. Caters to all products from organic, inorganic. Even dog friendly products like dog biscuits and dog collars, ice-creams of  different brands. They may not have an exhaustive list but they are almost on par with hyper markets.

 

On keeping up with the demands and requirements of a particular domain, Jhunjhunwala said that the advantages of online helped them to stay directly connected with the consumer. Everything is done in a centralized manner and the large amount of data had allowed them to do the analytics and observe the purchase pattern of the consumer and this helped in meeting with their requirements for the following months.

 

At present they are catering to almost 20,000 families and the effort is on to personalize the relationship but he says it can be difficult and is not 100%. Consumers have been divided into groups and catered to according to their buying patterns and the frequency of their orders.

 

When asked if they also maintained an offline communication on a regular basis with their customers he said, “Definitely, for offline we have voice communication. Consumers opt for a call at our call centres. Presently we have six different campaigns and we remind them of offers they can avail. These offers are catered to groupwise keeping in mind the benefits and psychology of the consumer groups. For e.g for someone who would like to buy pulses cheap we give them a buy of pulses combo and make an entire combo for them. We email, message and also call.”

While revolutionizing the concept they have been able to break the barriers of supplying groceries at home. It gives on option for the brand to interact directly with the consumer in their homes . The triple distribution model where the manufacturer, distributor and retailer are involved does not allow the consumer interaction because they cannot collect the analytics. But with online this is possible. This gives an entire multi range of options where they can partner with the brands to distribute their products in a better way.MyGrahak. Shopping Online Ltd. plans to look at collaborations with brands on a larger level within the next 6-12 months.

 

With respect to their turnover they are growing at a rate of 20%-25% on a month to month basis. Their present turnover right now is 1.3 crore a month. They would be able reach10x by this year end.

When the online store started off, families would place orders in the range of Rs 600-Rs 650 This has moved on now to the average range of Rs.1200- Rs.1300 and they have even seen customer groups who purchase even in the range of Rs3000-Rs4000. “Consumers are still in the stage of adoption. The range of these customers has been growing. So that being the most profitable segment we will also cater our marketing strategy to those consumers who have a purchasing power of Rs.3000-Rs.4000 which itself is a huge market.” says Jhunjhunwala.

 

Nearly 40-50% people are buying from them presently which they foresee will continue and most of their marketing strategies are geared up in such a way that they plan to increase this percentage. In countries abroad and Europe there are e-com groceries that are doing 97% return rate and this is what MyGrahak.Shopping Online Ltd. is looking at. The key to their marketing is to increase the ratio from 40% to 97%.

 

The marketing strategy and advertisements plans they have as of now are both ATL and BTL. In ATL they have started using radio to a miniscule level. Radio will be their dominating marketing channel and on the BTL side they plan to engage in mall activities.

 

When we enquired about the funding he said that they are self funded and have no partners at the moment. But they are constantly in discussion since they believe this is a capital incentive business. Where investment is concerned initially they expect to invest about 4-5 million dollars for each city including Delhi.

 

Did they face any deterrents and challenges along the way? There were not too many competitors and this was an advantage when this online store started. Absence of competition allowed them to move in the market in a very strategic way and gave enough time to learn and evolve strategies. There are no commercial players in Delhi but couple of them in Bangalore.

 

They had a run a pilot programme and are fundamentally strong. “We take time and understand the consumer. That is the crux of our strength today,” says Jhunjhunwala with regard to the success of his online store MyGrahak.shopping Online Ltd.