Three-month-old veggies, meat & fruit etailer GoOnions ships close to 1K orders worth Rs. 5 lakhs on monthly basis

We can order a wide variety of products and services over the web but daily needs like fresh veggies, meat and fruits are still pure-play offline affair for residents in NCR. Though, people in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad can leverage Bigbasket and Localbanya for ordering fruits, veggies and meat etc. Here is good news if you are in Gurgaon and want to buy veggies, fruits and meat online.

The Millenium city-based startup GoOnions lets you shop for varieties of fruits, vegetables, chicken, fish, prawns and mutton via phone, web, Twitter and WhatsApp. Importantly, unlike Localbanya and Bigbasket, GoOnions delivers anywhere in Gurgaon (including Manesar, Sohna and Faridabad Road) within two hours. “GoOnions was conceived keeping in mind the shortage of time and want for convenience for residents in Gurgaon,” says Raghav.

Brainchild of Raghav Vohra, Kailash Tripathi and Shivani Kapur, GoOnions sensed a gap and a need for such a service in Gurgaon, where most of the people are working and usually don’t have enough time to go and purchase veggies, fruits and meats on a regular basis.

Raghav and Kailash are civil engineers and have worked for over six years in sales and business development in civil engineering applications. Shivani has computer engineering degree with a decade-long experience in development and chalking out business strategies. Earlier, she had started an online media venture.

Interestingly, the three-month old startup has gathered decent appetite from consumers. “We ship around 35 orders every day with an average transaction size of Rs. 750,” says Shivani. With the current run rate GoOnions does around Rs. 5 lakh worth revenue on a monthly basis. “We have close to 3,000 registered users out of which approx 50% users are placing multiple orders in a month,” she adds.

Breaking through the mindset of consumers regarding freshness and quality of ordering perishable and consumable products online has been a big challenge so far for GoOnions. “Besides this, maintaining quality, meeting delivery deadline and identifying the correct human resource were a few initial challenges for us,” says Raghav.

GoOnions is about to break even, however the trio believes a lot more needs to be done to take things to the next level both

geographically and in terms of product range. “GoOnions are firm believers in the Go Green initiative hence our in-house team only operates ebikes to keep the environment pollution-free and healthy,” he says. The startup delivers orders in four slots ranging from morning 7AM to 10 PM late evening. At present, its operations are managed through a hybrid model of an in-house and an outsourced delivery team. “The in-house team manages 30% of the load whereas the outsourced team manages 70% of overall delivery,” adds Raghav.

The startup had created a buzz all over Gurgaon through its unique promotional scheme -- onions @ Re. 1 per kg. “We ran this scheme from Jan 27 to Feb 2, 2014, and sold 7000 plus kgs of onions in a week registering more than 2000 people,” reveals Shivani. GoOnions plans to expand geographically in the next six months covering entire Delhi (NCR), after which it plans to touch other major metro cities across India.

In our opinion, GoOnions seems to be a promising idea but building logistics and technology would require significant investment as it scales and expands its operations to Delhi and Noida. GoOnions is not a first attempt at selling veggies and fruits, earlier Anita Kashyap, wife of Ashish Kashyap, ibibo CEO, had launched Foodmandi. However, the startup folded up within six months of its existence.

Do you think selling fresh fruits and veggies online is a good idea? Do comment.