Since late 2014, it has been clear India is hot ground for mobile uptake among consumers. Hyperlocal start-ups invested in catalysing the O2O (online-to-offline) movement – help small retailers by enabling customers to get deals from and find products in their vicinity – began to emerge.

Whether merchants really benefit from this trend, and whether their hyperlocal ‘partners’ are worth the commissions they receive are vital questions at this time. Meanwhile, an app-only hyperlocal marketplace, Little, barely a year old, prides itself on being ‘merchant friendly’.

Strategic focus

When Little kicked off in late July 2015, it was to create ‘platform play’ around services by segments that it identified as ‘under-served’. The company operates in categories such as food and beverage, entertainment, spas and wellness, healthcare and last-minute hotels. The F&B vertical, however, currently contributes two-thirds of Little’s volumes.

Manish Chopra, Little’s CEO and Co-founder, explains, “In many of the segments we’re in, capacity utilisation and unsold inventory were challenges. In F&B, while end customers were earlier searching out F&B players on their smartphones, most of our F&B clientele were unable to interact with tens of millions of smartphone toting customers.”

Interestingly, even with the rise of food delivery start-ups, Little claims its partners such as Rajdhani, Paradise Biryani and Costa Coffee enjoy healthy custom. Paradise Biryani, in particular, used to see a decrease in walk-ins after 2.30 pm; the partnership with Little has brought “pleasant surprises”, according to Chopra. Similarly, Monday used to be a comparatively dull day for Rajdhani, and the partnership with Little has brought them hundreds of additional walk-in customers on Mondays. Much of this was noticed over a period of six months.

Smart play

Little helps add walk-ins to merchant establishments. Little’s merchants have an app to operate deals on the platform. These deals are dynamic, time sensitive and completely in the merchant’s control.

“We’re not pushing deals that are irrelevant. About 66 per cent of deals have been within 3km of the customer’s location. We become meaningful for our merchants by creating a sticky set of customers with high repeat behaviour,” Chopra says.

Little also claims to keep cost structures low to benefit its merchants – it charges them a commission of 6-8 per cent unlike other platforms that charge 30-40 per cent.

If proof of the pudding is in the eating, Little’s tactics have worked. It has 10,000 merchants enrolled on its platform offering 30,000 deals in 11 cities across the country. All this hyperlocal success in under a year.

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