Small retailers turn to tech to cut losses

With the seventh largest city in the country fast becoming a bigger hotseat for organised retail, unorganised players like small retailers and vendors seem to have given up on the protests. Instead, small players in Ahmedabad are now devising new strategies to take on competition from the likes of Reliance Fresh, More and Spencers.

For this, the players are making optimum use of technology like mobile phones, billing machines and computers. Prominent of them all is the use of mobile phones.

According to Piyush Sinha, an IIM-A professor who specialises in the area of retail, vegetable vendors and grocers are increasingly using mobile phones to maintain a decent inventory. "With a loyal customer base, these players call up their customers to determine their daily or weekly requirements of the merchandise. Armed with the list of items that will be sold for sure, the grocers and vendors accordingly fix up their inventory and buy only those items from the wholesale market or APMC," said Sinha.

By maintaining such a fixed inventory, the vendors reduce the risk of maintaining unsold items. Moreover, this particularly helps vendors and grocers in maintaining an inventory of perishable goods like fruits and vegetables.

"Earlier, we had protested a lot against the foray of organised retail companies into necessities like fruits and vegetables. But now we realise that we will have to face the competition head-on. Though, a small number of us have been making a good use of technology like mobile phones or computers, the trend is catching on. Already, the ones who have been following the trend have witnessed a drop in their losses by 40 per cent since a couple of months," said Hidaji Prajapati, joint convenor of Roji Bachao Samiti (RBS), an umbrella association of small-time vendors and retailers.

During its protests against the retail companies, RBS had demanded that big players withdraw sales of necessities worth less than Rs 100 per kg "which fell on deaf ears", added Prajapati. Similarly, mom-and-pop store owners have begun using automated billing machines for offering better and more authorised services to their customers.

IT peripherals, solutions and service company WeP Peripherals has been selling around 25 of its BP-40 billing machines per month in Gujarat.

The machines, which have been strategically developed for small retailers, do not require any PC connection and can store up to 2,000 items in its memory.