BigBasket is India’s biggest online store for grocery shopping. It was founded in 2011 by a group of people named Mr. V S Sudhakar, Mr. Hari Menon, Mr. Vipul Parekh, Mr. Abhinay Choudhari and Mr. V S Ramesh. BigBasket currently operates from Banglore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad and providing their services in 22 different cities in India. With more than 1800 grocery products and 1000 brands featuring on BigBasket.
Future of Online Grocery Market In India:
The grocery retail market in India is growing at 10% CAGR(Compound annual growth rate) which is currently about the size of 400 Billion. Out of which online grocery accounts to only 0.1% of it. The Online grocery market is expected to grow to 10 billion dollars in next 4 years and is likely to be concentrated in urban areas of the country.
History Behind Bigbasket:
The founders of BigBasket first time got together is 1999 and started one of the first online business in India with the name of fabmart. As a part of fabmart they started online grocery business as Fabmart.com. This business did exceedingly well in the market and company went to set up various physical supermarkets in South India. In 2006 FabMart was acquired by Aditya Birla Group and renamed the brand to More Supermarket. However, the same team got back in 2011 and launched BigBasket.
Business Model:
Today BigBasket is India’s biggest and most used online grocery store in India. They deliver 35000 orders per day with the average price of the order is 1500. BigBasket has products of their own and allows other companies to showcase their product on the portal. With more than 40% of orders coming from their own brands and remaining on other brands. BigBasket operates at the margin of 35% on the sale of their own product and 25% on the sale of third party products.
Funding:
BigBasket highest fund raising was 150 million dollars in March 2016 led by Abraaj Capital in its Series D of funding. Some of the other investors are Bessemer Ventures, Helion, Zodius and existing investors who participated including Ascent Capital, Lion Rock Capital and Ganesh Krishnan and Meena Ganesh.
Recently BigBasket has raised 45 crores from Trifecta Capital which takes the complete tally of funds raised to 290 million dollars in its 8 series of funding from 11 investors.
Customer Service:
One of the biggest factors in BigBasket’s success is exceptional customer focus. The company offers same day delivery with in the city with more than 99% on time delivery and 99.5% of order fulfillment rate.
BigBasket’s return policy is also very simple and they have a policy of no questions asked to the customer while returning. All of these things have built a loyal customer base and excellent customer feedback.
Competition in E-Grocery Market:
The online grocery market has grown big time in India since it was born. With new player adding up to the market and many of the big offline supermarket going online everyone has to keep up their game to retain the existing customers and to attract new ones. One of the big name in online grocery market and one of the biggest competitors for Bigbasket is “Grofers”. Grofer right now is operating in 17 cities which is one less than BigBasket was launched in 2013 which is two years after BigBasket. Grofer has also been investors favorite and raised around 150 million dollars in last 4 years.
Other Key players in the market are Pepper Tap and Zopnow and there is new big entrant Amazon. Amazon is the biggest name in e-commerce and has come to e-grocery market. The company started its operation in December 2016 although we don’t have any official data the company was able to attract many customers due to its name in the E-commerce market.
Marketing and Branding:
Although BigBasket is purely internet based company, BigBasket chose biggest Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan as their brand ambassador. With series of Tv commercials and billboard advertising featuring Shahrukh Khan, BigBasket has become a popular name among online grocery buyers.
