Tata Group jumped into the online grocery shopping bandwagon last year with the soft launch of its e-tailing platform StarQuik.com ater acquiring Gurugram-based GrocerMax in June last year for an undisclosed amount. The founder of GrocerMax K.Radhakrishnan is currently the Co-founder at Tata Starquik.com. At present, the brand has presence in Andheri West.
K.Radhakrishnan, Co-founder, Tata StarQuik.com told Indiaretailing Bureau on the sidelines of India Food Forum 2018, “We are now opening in Thane and plan to soon cover whole of Mumbai. Then we go to Bengaluru and Pune. In next one year, we will be in all the cities where Star Bazaar is like Gujarat, Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad.”
Starquik is the Omnichannel arm of Star Bazaar Retail where Star Bazaar is a B2B partner. The idea behind launching the brand was to extend the service coverage area of store using the online services.
“So Starquik is an online site and we sell 10,000 items that are sold in the Star Bazaar store within 3-hours to the customers door-step that covers all perishable, fruit and vegetables, milk, meat, fish, dairy, all FMCG and general merchandise. I doubt any other player anywhere else in the country is doing the kind of model that we are doing,” revealed K.Radhakrishnan.
According to K.Radhakrishnan, in grocery, being big does not ensure success. It takes several decades to be able to understand the supply chain and the consumer aspirations and expectations and there are very few players internationally who have done grocery online retail successfully.
“I think we have a model which is a winner and we are capable enough to compete competitors like Amazon. There is enough space for everybody. It is a US $300 billion market. So it will take a long time to get saturated. We have no worry at all,” asserted K.Radhakrishnan.
He further added, “We are a part of TATA company, so trust that comes from the name of 150 years of existence is huge and the other thing is that no one does 10,000 items in 3-hours to customers door-step.”
The brand, which was launched in December last year, has tasted an unqualified success and is pretty happy with the business model and is hopeful of extending the services to all Star Bazaar stores soon.
Elaborating on the business model, K.Radhakrishna said, “We have a asset-like variable-cost model and we operate on top of the Star Bazaar stores. We are paper-less, error-less platform and we have built very good front-end and we have our own open source, ERP system at the back. We work with 14 apps which inter-link into each other. We track everything. Technology is actually not really visible but present at the back-end. ”
Starquik.com is also working constantly to improve the customer experience.
“Enhancing the customer experience is built into the model but it will keep on evolving. So I think just doing the basics right is a great service for the consumers today as far as grocery is concerned. The consumer is struggling to buy grocery in an easy manner at the same time they also want to save money. Either it is too difficult and you save money and actually go through the hardships or the product is too expensive. We believe we will give convenience as well as saving and great quality merchandise to the customer,” concluded K.Radhakrishnan.
