AskmeBazaar upbeat on hyperlocal: Clocks $1mn worth of daily transactions!

Mumbai, November 3, 2015: India’s fastest growing online marketplace, AskmeBazaar.com, today announced that it is extremely optimistic about its pioneering hyperlocal service that offers a wide portfolio of products across categories including home and office, medical equipment, grocery and furniture. The company announced that it is recording $1 mn worth of daily transactions from this model. Hyperlocal model is based on a local sourcing model that ensures customer delight by connecting local buyers to the local sellers.

Hyperlocal is a city-based model that addresses the local buyers’ demands by fostering an ecosystem of local sellers, and also promises faster delivery, ensures no in-transit damage, and provides local warranty and billing. Hyperlocal also has a plethora of other advantages including easy availability of bulk quantities and local deals. The hyperlocal model is a blessing for the seller community as it not only helps them to build on the local buyer base, but also guarantees faster seller settlement.

AskmeBazaar’s Next Day Delivery (NDD) service assures delivery of products the very next day of order placement, at no extra cost to the customer. It is live in top 25 cities in the country as of today and plans are underway to launch it in 25 more cities in the next 2 months. AskMe Grocery offers Same Day Delivery across a wide range of grocery items within 4 to 6 hours of placing the order. It is available in 15 cities currently and will be scaled up to cover 40+ top cities in the next 3 months. The hyperlocal service is available in the furniture category across 15 cities in the country.

Speaking on hyperlocal business model, Mr. Kiran Murthi, CEO, AskmeBazaar said, “AskMe, because of its legacy of long relationships with over 14 million businesses across the country, has the right DNA for hyperlocal. In the last one year, the group has been successful in rolling out and scaling up multiple hyperlocal businesses that are significantly more efficient than the current inventory based models.”

Commenting on the grocery category, Mr. Ankit Jain, Co-Founder, AskMe Grocery, “Grocery is one of the most promising categories for the e-commerce industry today. We have built a robust ecosystem in each of the 15 cities and intend to scale it up to 27 cities by November end. We are adding new categories in grocery thereby, giving the customer an extensive range of options to choose from. We strongly believe that quality and customer experience is what matters and it is our topmost priority. Our objective is to achieve steady and fast growth and we are targeting 10,000 orders per day in the next 3-6 months.”

Commenting on the furniture vertical, Mr. Rahul Agrawal, Co-Founder and CEO, Mebelkart said, “Furniture is a category that is apt for hyperlocal e-commerce model. Hyperlocal in furniture promises numerous benefits to the buyers like faster deliveries, no damages and minimal in-transit cost. We are looking at adding more sellers across cities and increase our SKUs from current 2.5 lacs to 10 lacs in the next 2 months. We will also be offering Next Day Delivery for a select category of furniture items to begin with, and intend to scale this up to over 80% of our product portfolio in the next 6 months."

AskmeBazaar’s Next Day Delivery business is based on the hyperlocal, O2O model and is currently selling products across 12+ categories including home and office range, cameras, mobiles, consumer electronics and medical equipments.

Talking about the NDD business model, Mr. Marichi Mathur, Head- Next Day Delivery, AskmeBazaar added, “The NDD model from AskmeBazaar is a capital light model that marries the best of offline anyd online commerce. NDD is setting new benchmarks for customer delight with free next day delivery and lowest prices on products. We will be augmenting the existing range with new categories like inverters, sanitary fittings and hardware and hope to offer a wider selection palette to the customers.”