India’s largest online supermarket, BigBasket allows a customer to walk away from the drudgery of grocery shopping and present an easy relaxed way of browsing and shopping for groceries.
It was launched in the year 2011, the time when e-commerce was in its nascent stage in India. It was founded by Hari Menon, VS Sudhakar, V S Ramesh, Vipul Paresk and Abhinay.
Headquartered in Bengaluru, BigBasket deliver to various cities in India including Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Noida, Mysore, Patna, Indore to name a few.
The grocery platform offers over 18,000 products and more than 1000 brands in its catalogue you will find everything you are looking for. Right from fresh fruits and vegetables, rice, and dals, spices, and seasonings to packaged products.
Select from a wide assortment of options in every category, exclusively handpicked to help you find the best quality at the lowest price.
The best part about BigBasket is that it entered the market when the busy workforce of India was finding it tough to allocate time to purchase groceries and home essentials.
It brought a kind of flexibility for those people to place their orders anytime and get the things delivered at their preferred time.
While BigBasket is flourishing at breakneck speed, one of the major challenges the company faces is with blue-collar workers that make up 75 percent of their workforce.
Even if 30 people do not show up, the whole business goes down. In many cases, where the team does not have the workforce with full capacity, they have to hold back, push orders and discuss with the customer.
Festival times are the most difficult. In this situation, the team cut its capacity. So when a customer places an order, he would receive a time slow for two days later.
The customer is not going to wait for two days for groceries. This is one of the biggest negative points and the team is grappling with it. The same kind of situation, the brand has faced during the demonetization. But the team was keen on building an online grocery store.
The online delivery platform, BigBasket was launched in the year 2011, but its journey has started much earlier. It was in 1999, that a group of people including V S Sudhakar, Vipul Parekh, V S Ramesh, and Abhinay Choudhari launched their online retail business named Fabmart.
The business flourished quite well and later physical retail malls named Fabmall were launched in different locations in South India.
The business was eventually sold to the Aditya Birla Group and it is popularly known as ‘More’ retail chain. Although the founders were itching to begin something very new and with their expertise in a retail business, they all came together once again to start Bigbasket in 2011.
BigBasket works on a unique inventory model that allows you to work with producers and vendors on contracts. Apart from the excellent quality control, it helps in saving costs. Additionally, BigBasket is creating better leverage with suppliers due to healthy margins.
BigBasket has got funding worth around $526 million. The major investors of the company including Alibaba Group, Ascent Capital, Brand Capital, Helion Venture Partners, ICICI Venture, LionRock Capital, Paytm Mall to name a few
In the year 2015, BigBasket acquired Delyver for an undisclosed amount. It was an online grocery store and its specialty was using the local store to deliver groceries to people. Now, all business assets of Deliver have been merged with BigBasket.
With an average ticket size of Rs 1,500 for the full stack and Rs 650 for Express delivery, the company will soon touch revenue of Rs 1,800 crore by the end of the fiscal year. Now, they are target close to $1 billion in revenue by 2020.
Today, BigBasket competes with different start-ups in the online grocery segment. Some of their major competitors include Grofers, Peppertap, and Aarashop to name a few.
Different city-specific online retail stores have also emerged that are giving tough competition to the company. Among them, giant e-commerce players like Amazon India and Flipkart has also started selling groceries online.
The alumnus of BITS Pilani, Hari Menon is the CEO of BigBasket. V S Sudhakar is another guiding force of the company. He is the co-founder and deals with senior management decisions at the organizational level. Vipul Pareksl the alumnus of IIM Bangalore. He heads the Finance & marketing department.
The alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, Abhinay Choudhari heads the new initiatives at BigBasket. The engineering graduate, V S Ramesh heads logistics and supply chain at the company.
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