Online grocery platform Grofers Friday said it is scaling up its 'group buying programme' (GBP) pan-India and expects the initiative to contribute 25-30 per cent of its revenue this fiscal.
Grofers, which competes with BigBasket and large e-commerce players like Flipkart and Amazon, started a pilot for GBP in Bengaluru in July this year and has been expanding it to other cities like Delhi, Mumbai and others.
"Based on insights, we found buyers taking screenshots of the products and price listed on our platform, and then sharing that within their WhatsApp groups. Especially in the lower middle class families in India, there is behaviour around committees and kitty, so we thought of mimicking that behaviour online," Grofers co-founder and CEO Albinder Dhindsa told PTI.
Under GBP, if there are numerous people ready to buy a particular product, Grofers will give them better prices, he said, adding that the average cart size is about Rs 1,100 for such purchases.
The online group buying store 'Share to Save' has been expanded to be active through the Android app in all the 13 cities where Grofers operates. The programme will also be available through the website by mid-October.
"We are extremely happy with initial results for the programme. By the end of the fiscal, we expect GBP to contribute 25-30 per cent of our overall revenue," he said. The initiative is also helping add new customers to the platform, he added.
During the pilot phase, the company found that categories that worked well included kitchen utensils, cosmetics, and food items like cereals and biscuits.
"The number of people needed in a group depends on the product, it could be just 2. Similarly, the discount would also depend on the product... The idea is to drive volume on a single product," Dhindsa said.
Grofers, which counts names like SoftBank, Tiger Global and Apoletto Asia among its investors, expects its revenue to cross Rs 2,500 crore this fiscal. Its average daily order volumes were over 35,000 per day in June this year.
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