Online grocery start-up ZopNow is targeting $100 million in GMV in calendar year 2017, a 4x growth from its GMV in 2016.

Founded in 2011 by Mukesh Singh, ZopNow pivoted from the inventory model in 2014 to run a 100 per cent inventory-free model by forging long-term partnerships with More, HyperCity, Metro and Star Bazaar with its services available in 10 cities.

“We are entering a high-growth phase in 2017, and are targeting $100 million in GMV in 2017, at a time when many other players in e-grocery have put the brakes on expansion,” Raj Pandey, CEO, ZopNow, told BusinessLine .

“Over the past three years, we have created an ecosystem of sophisticated suppliers and best-in-class technology to provide 25,000 products, including fresh fruits, vegetables, staples along with general merchandise, to our customers, which should easily get us to our target.”

He said e-grocery is a $300-million market in India that is massively under penetrated at 0.1 per cent, and is set to grow to $25 billion by 2020 with penetration increasing to 4 per cent.

Pandey’s strategy to achieve $100 million GMV includes enabling more offline hypermarkets and supermarkets to reach online customers; increasing wallet share and basket size; expanding selection beyond groceries with general merchandise such as toasters, coffee makers, bedsheets, pillows, printer cartridges etc; and enabling potential customers outside delivery areas to order online and collect offline from stores nearest to them. Currently, ZopNow’s website and app, which attracts 1 lakh monthly active users contribute 50 per cent each to the total transactions.

“We want to get to 1 lakh transactions a day from 5,000 a day at present, and enable all our partner stores to receive 500 orders per day, which is already happening in some of our partner stores. We want to up average order value from ₹1,100 to ₹1,500. We introduced a new shipping policy in October where we upped minimum order for free shipping from ₹300 to ₹750, which has increased average order value by 20 per cent in the past two months,” said Pandey.

e-grocery service ZopNow is also offering e-grocery as a Service, a SaaS solution, to large brick-and-mortar retailers that want to go online with a proven technology platform. It has launched online retail stores for More and HyperCity along with their branded apps, enabling 10-30 per cent of their overall sales, allowing these retailers’ customers an omni-channel experience.

The start-up is taking the SaaS model global with West Asia East and South East Asia as immediate markets to go live in six months, providing an additional revenue stream for the IP it has built.

The company has raised $15 million in funding to date and is backed by investors such as Accel Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Dragoneer Investment Group.

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