Fresh veggies on your doorstep

Online shopping

Sunday afternoons often turn tetchy in homes where both partners are working. The reason being the need to shop for groceries, for the week ahead that requires the husbands to accompany their wives to the supermarke

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“After six days of working hard, I was ready to pay Rs 100 extra to anyone who offered to buy groceries for my house and save the two hours of my only week off,” says Gurgaon-based Navneet Singh, an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad. He used his personal experience to start the website PepperTap.com.

It is a hyperlocal grocery delivery service that provides an exhaustive list of grocery products to the consumers’ doorstep. “Once the order is placed by the consumer, we approach our local grocer for the product and then deliver it at the required address within 15-20 minutes,” informs Singh whose business model includes taking a percentage cut from a-particular partner than increasing the grocery price for the consumers.

A similar model to capture the local market has already been applied in Mumbai by Localbanya.com. It is gaining popularity for delivering groceries. “When we started, nobody did this in Mumbai before us,” says Rashi Choudhary, COO and co-founder of the website. They operate by cutting out on the middlemen and sourcing products directly from the farm or market.

“The minimum time we take for delivery is four-and-a-half hours. One can even choose the time one wants the grocery to get delivered,” she adds.
The delivery in the case of Zopnow.com works in the three-hour cycle. The website that started selling groceries primarily took time to research that people can buy fruits and vegetables without touching and feeling.

“The idea to start selling groceries online struck me when I used to live in Gurgaon and had to go for shopping with my six-months pregnant wife. I realised that in the new localities, the penetration of suppliers is very less,” says Mukesh Singh, founder of Zopnow.com, which operates in Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune.
Singh is hopeful of the trend catching up in future. “Given that traffic is a nightmare, I think the demand for groceries will increase online. Also, with time, people will feel deprived of time and would want to cut time on activities which consume a major chunk – grocery shopping being one of them.”     
While PepperTap.com is expanding and shall touch base in Delhi next month, Zopnow.com is eyeing the Capital and NCR too. So don’t be surprised if your local sabziwallah starts complaining of low sales in future!