From credit to planned operations, Arzooo gives disconnected retailers the edge to take on the could of Amazon, Flipkart

Online shopping has not only come a long way in the last decade, it has also changed the way we shop offline. Today, offline retailers are not only competing with online sellers by extending facilities such as ordering-from-home, but are also offering a large number of product choices and better prices. This can be seen the most in categories such as furniture and large appliances.

No one can understand this better than Khushnud Khan, who was at one point handling the large appliances category in Flipkart. Khan joined the Bengaluru-headquartered e-commerce player in 2014, at a time when consumers in India were getting excited about buying refrigerators and washing machines online. The same year, Flipkart came up with a new sales category for large appliances and furniture. Amazon followed suit in 2015.

“There was a good amount of heat in India’s e-commerce space with Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal. Those days, all three big e-commerce players were at their peak. With Big Billion Days and Great Indian Festivals, the buzz around online shopping moved at a rapid pace,” he says.

Khan has worked in this deals space for a long while. Preceding Flipkart, he was the business head at IFB Industries Ltd from 2012 to 2014. He likewise has had a spell as a zonal chief in retail tasks at Tata Sky. In this way, he had a ringside seat to the advancement of the internet business market in India.

By 2014-15, he says, cell phones covered around 35% of online deals in India. Notwithstanding, the huge apparatus class was moving sluggishly and had an extremely sluggish foothold on the web. Two years after the send off of this classification, it became something like 6-7% customers on the web. Furniture was not moving by any means.

Regardless of that, there was a gigantic change in purchaser purchasing conduct. "Regardless of whether individuals were purchasing items disconnected, they would stroll into the store and promptly look into the item on the web. They'd find out if he can coordinate or show improvement over the cost on Amazon or Flipkart for a specific TV, ice chest or clothes washer. This change was harming disconnected dealers — the occupations of lakhs of individuals rely upon disconnected retail," he says.

This was complicated. Khan says he understood that purchasing enormous machines was to a greater degree a family undertaking in more modest urban areas. The entire family proceeds to look for a retailer's help to be aware of an item. In this way, these classes are never going to take half of the internet based deals. Simultaneously, disconnected retailers need to modernize and move up to have the option to contend with arising on the web players.

"In view of that thought, we needed to take the best of web based business and innovation into disconnected stores. Furthermore, that is the point at which I and Rishi — who was then in item the board in Flipkart — chose to fabricate a business around it," he says.

Comprehensive Stage

Khan and Rishi Raj Rathore began Arzooo in 2018. The Bengaluru-based web-based stage gives disconnected hardware retailers a level battleground to contend with internet business players. It gives disconnected retailers a huge determination of items through a computerized stock and the right valuing procedure to contend with online dealers.

"You go to a shop, you will track down 50 TVs or 30-40 fridges to look over. However, assuming you go to Amazon or Flipkart, you will observe that dealers separately offer no less than 500 fridges or 100 TVs to browse. So how would we empower a disconnected store with that. Arzoo's foundation gives a virtual stock answer for retailers. Anyone strolling into the store will see a bigger choice than Amazon and Flipkart set up. Stores are likewise ready to upsell and strategically pitch various items without putting truly in that store, in that stock. That is the force of computerized stock that we give," he makes sense of.

These little players were divided and had exceptionally low dealing power when contrasted with a Croma or Reliance Digital, he says, so they were getting extremely low edges from producers. Arzooo began giving these venders admittance to much better costs, assisting them with working on their edges by 15-20%.

Today, Arzooo has almost 20,000 stores across south India.

Arzooo plans to engage the retailers. In the wake of settling the valuing conglomeration, the organization last year sent off its fintech arrangement — Arzooo Credit. "Credit basically is something that empowers a storekeeper with seriously working capital. Arzooo Credit opens a credit line of up to Rs 20 lakh to give you capital quickly to deal with your business. These entrepreneurs typically oversee business with exceptionally close working capital. Remaining cutthroat with such a tight working capital circumstance is extremely challenging for them. Along these lines, this is something else we needed to tackle," Khan says.