What are Snapbizz’ biggest milestones?
Over the past few years, we grow into the preferred technology solution for the kirana stores across the major cities we were present in. This was because we were able to receive the trust of the kirana stores who found our solution extremely easy-to-use and were able to fully operate all the features right from day 1. The retailers viewed our products as a “money-making machine” which enabled him to increase his business by 20%.
What really keeps us going is when we see a 70-year-old grandmother of a family-run kirana store using our solution with ease or a 21-year-old seventh-standard pass store boy taking charge of his boss’s store with total control using our solution. The love we have been getting from our stores has been overwhelming.
On the FMCG eco-system side, we have worked with over 100 FMCG brands in the areas of data analytics and consumer engagement. We also worked closely with major FMCG B2B players, Banks and fintech players, and research agencies to help them engage with the retailers and add value to both – theirs and the retailers business.
We are also creating a social impact by (a) reversing the marginalisation of the SMEs (b) digital/financial inclusion of the SMEs and (c) up skilling people at the bottom of the pyramid. We have been working closely with various partners to drive (a) adoption of healthy food products among slum dwellers (b) nationwide hygiene practices in kirana stores and (c) women to play a bigger role in kirana/FMCG business.
Can you give us a brief about the company?
We have developed a unique technology solution for Kirana stores that transforms it into a smart store with the help of a few plug and play options. It has positioned its product as a “money-making machine” for kirana stores as it helps the store owners to improve their profitably. The solutions come with a host of features (back by AI and ML) to help the kirana stores compete with the larger supermarket chains from an intelligence standpoint. The easy-to-use solutions to manage and optimize store operations include:
Point of Sales Solutions: Based on the business volumes/size of the kirana stores, it has a range of solutions/apps that enables the store owners to digitize all aspects of store operations – billing, customer management, inventory management, online ordering of supplies, create virtual merchandising space, take the store online and cloud-connect them to all the stakeholders of the eco-system to get better promotions/discounts from brands and suppliers
SnapOrder: A mobile app that enables Kirana stores of all sizes to go online with their supplies instantly. The consumers can use the app to place orders directly with the Kirana stores – either for pick-up or for home delivery. This enables the Kirana store to manage demand efficiently and prevent over-crowding at the store – particularly during the lockdown period
What is your most recent product?
Solution for Kirana stores: While we deliver a technology solution for kirana stores, the positioning of our product for them is a “money-making machine”. The solution transforms the kirana stores into a smart store. The key features to the retailers are: (a) easy-to-use solution to manage and optimise store operations (b) take the store online with SnapOrder app (c) create virtual merchandising space with SnapVision and (d) cloud-connect them to all the stakeholders of the eco-system through SnapConnect and enabling them to get promotions/discounts from brands and suppliers. SnapBizz has achieved excellence in product-market fit by
Customising its solutions – depending on the type of kirana stores and the size of its business Overcoming key challenges of a kirana store such as management of peak hour traffic, billing both bar-coded and non-barcoded products and making it simple even for a store boy to learn and use quickly and independently.
Solution for FMCG stakeholders:
The Smart Kirana store is now cloud-connected real-time to the various stakeholders of the FMCG ecosystem such as brands, wholesalers, distributors, research/advertising agencies, e-commerce players and financial service players. We provide all of them with (a) last mile- connect with consumer and store (b) never-before data and opportunity to holistically understand the store and to optimise the relationships with them.
This allows FMCG brands to engage consumers visually and contextually, run targeted promotions, overcome supply chain & assortment challenges and avoid stock outs. For e-commerce players, the platform offers them an opportunity to leverage the hyper local assortment, inventory and delivery capabilities of the kirana store so that they can service their consumers and scale-up operations. For the wholesalers and distributors, the platform enables them to increase share of wallet and get insights on what they are missing out on selling to the stores. For Finserve players, the platform gives them access to reach out, engage the kirana stores with financial service products and continually track the financial health of the store.
Can you give us a brief description on Kirana Retail market in India and how cloud tech companies are helping them stay relevant?
There are over ten million Kirana stores in India and they contribute to 90% of the Indian FMCG business. The Indian FMCG Industry is a $540 Bn industry – equally split between packaged goods and loose items. What makes it more interesting is that the product goes through 3 transactions before it reaches the consumer; thereby making it the transactional space of $ 1600Bn.
There are over 3 million kirana stores (Class A, B & C stores that contribute to 80% of GMV) across India that are waiting to digitise in the next few years. The current situation has merely sped up the speed of digitisation of these stores.
What are the biggest challenges that you have faced as a company?
Some of the difficulties that we faced when we started the business was to acquire the first set of retailers in each town (after which the scale-up in that town happens very fast due to network effect). Few years back, we faced setback/disruptions in the market due to the demonization and also the GST national rollout which slowed us down. Fortunately, this ended up being good tailwinds for us thereafter which enabled us to strengthen our store network.
In the past few months, since the March lockdown, we have had significant traction for our solutions from the kirana store owners who have now realised the need for a technology solution for their stores to tackle Covid-19 era challenges (change in consumer behaviour, need for social digitisation, supply-side optimisation etc.).
The last 120 days has been an extremely rewarding for us as we have seen our technology solutions enable retailers overcome some of the Covid-19 related challenges. The current situation has also significantly mitigated the inertia to adopt tech solutions and has transformed our solutions into a “must-to-have” solution rather than a “good-to-have” solution for the store. What has been most rewarding is that we could earn the trust of the retailers, helped them to address their business challenges and improve store profitability.
Having achieved excellence in product-market fit, we have two major challenges – (a) building brand awareness for the solutions and (b) building a strong distribution network. While we have been operating in 7 major cities in the past few years where our current distribution network caters to just these cities, we are getting interest from smaller towns from all over India. Therefore, our challenge now is to build a robust distribution network so that can cater to over 200 cities/towns all over India.
What is the story behind the brand?
In early 2000s while working in Eastern Europe, I noticed the challenges that the FMCG retail there faced which was (a) the lack of an integrated eco-system for FMCG and (b) lack of visibility to store/consumer data; this drove me to build a company – CisLink in order to overcome these challenges. This company, even today, continues to remain a market leader in Russia and Eastern Europe. The journey of SnapBizz started off with Qualcomm doing a pilot in India to take wireless technology into fragmented retail. Given the success of the pilot, they did a global search for an entrepreneur who had the experience of building a company in the same space. Having understood my work with CisLink, they reached out to me. And that’s how SnapBizz was born with Qualcomm being our first investor.
What is your 5year plan?
Being the experts in grocery tech and FMCG ecosystem play, our relevance has exponentially gone up and we expect this to be the turning point in our journey. We are strengthening our organisation on technology and data science to rise up to the new expectations of the market. We have enriched some of our product features such as SnapOrder (retailers’ B2C ordering app), SnapSupply (distributors’ B2B ordering app) and SnapPulse (retail analytics solution) which will enable the eco-system players to meet the current challenges.
We are a platform of 10,000 stores that collectively do a business of $1 Billion/year GMV. We aim to build a network of 2,00,000 stores in the next couple of years and become a $15 billion platform. We plan to work closely with over 200 brands, a large number of distributors/wholesalers, major e-commerce and financial services players.
What is your biggest learning in the market?
We have been pleasingly surprised with the resiliency with which kirana store owners have stood up to the challenges over the years – with a smile! Just when the naysayers have been sounding death knell for them – be it the onslaught of big box players/big supermarkets more than a decade back, be it the aggressive marketing play by e-commerce players in grocery sector in the past few years or be it the current Covid-19 situation; they have constantly adapted to the changes, re-invented themselves with new practices/processes and have come out from these situations stronger. We are also seeing the crucial role that they have been playing in the Indian economy and servicing the needs of 1.3 Billion people. This was something which was understated over the years, but they are now finally being given the credit where it’s due.
The most enriching part of my journey was the social impact that a simple technology solution can have on the lives of the store employees. Few years back, a boy in a kirana store in Pune thanked me as he got a Rs. 1200 increment in salary from the kirana store owner (his boss) which allowed him to send his sister to an English medium school. The reason for getting this increment was that he was able to increase the sales of the store by using SnapBizz Solution.