Hyderabad based online supermarket, Galaxilocal.com

Monday July 16, 2012 , 3 min Read

Started in Dec 2011, Galaxilocal is a Hyderabad based startup that went live in February, 2012. Founded by Sashi and Rekha, this online supermaket has a 15 member team is running on a seed capital from friends and family. With their back-end ERP outsourced to a vendor,this technology intensive company has its own call centre team, delivery team, IT team and purchases team to meet the requirements of their business.Being an operation intensive business, Galaxilocal believes itself to be in a high entry barrier space. “Startups like ours need to be set up right to be sustainable. We are doing a trade business. What we are trying to do is to use technology to add value,” says Sashi with 16 years in IT, explaining their business proposition. Operating through phone and internet, their value proposition is that their customers can shop sitting at home apart from the price discounts they offer with log in access to their past purchases. In order to minimize the upfront capital, their focus is on leveraging technology to the maximum extent and so they use SAAS based shopping cart and call centre based on the cloud.

What’s interesting is that these guys home deliver fruits, vegetables and fresh meat for cash on delivery or card on delivery. Their delivery personnel also carry a swipe machine to the customer’s house for card payments. They also have a pre-order system to get enough time to procure the commodities from the supplier and deliver it to their customers. Any order made before 12pm will be delivered after 5pm on the same day. If customers order after 5pm then their order will be delivered before 12pm the next day.

Still in their soft launch, Galaxilocal has managed to secure a customer base of 250 regular buyers and 1000 registered customers. As for their marketing strategy, they have decided to keep it simple. They talk to management of apartment complexes and deliver a sample fruits and vegetables basket to all the apartments. If they actually buy then they can also subscribe to the vegetable basket.

As for their road ahead, Sashi says “Multi-channel commerce is something that is going to be a combination of click & brick for us in the future with a few stores as well. I assume in the retail modern trade, the modern trade guys – supermarkets will have online and offline format.”

Whether click and brick or not, price differentiation is something that most ecommerce sites today are playing pinning their hopes to top line revenues over time. As the market shows from the experience of other market players, price differentiation might be too risky as a key differentiatior. With no real competition for Galaxilocal in Hyderabad at the moment, the pinch may not be too hard. If and when the competition picks up, the true potential of this operation intensive company is likely to show up.

More about Galaxilocal.

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