The champion of small stores

From bargaining with your local vendor to strolling down never-ending aisles at shopping markets to scrolling through your phone to buy home needs, technology has made customers’ lives much easier. But helping local vendors fight their way back into your lives is Nukkad Shops, a tech-based start-up from Hyderabad.

“We’re focused on retailers. It’s essentially a technology partner for small businesses, helping your neighbourhood grocer to be more efficient, competitive and earn more,” says co-founder Vivek Shukla.

An idea that began to take shape in May last year, the former product manager says that seeing a few friends of his, who were retailers, losing their business to big chains made him want to come up with a way to help them reclaim their market share. “India’s retail sector is worth about $300 billion and 90 per cent of that is controlled by the unorganised sector, but nobody thinks about them. So we knew there would also be a huge opportunity for us here,” Vivek says.

Nukkad Shops has also won awards from the Indian start-up community, most recently winning Nasscom’s Get In The Ring challenge, beating over 32 finalists from around 400 that registered for the event.

Partnering with co-founder Ravi Korukonda, the company has already tied up with more than 200 shops in the past year, offering them a connected invoice system that helps shop owners with billing, inventory management, create mobility with the ability to sell online and even access to deep analytics that lets the retailers keep track of customers’ buying habits.

For the consumers, Vivek says, “They can see the shops in their area, select what to buy and have them delivered. The turnaround time for these shops is typically 30 to 45 minutes for a range of 2 km, which makes it one of the fastest delivery systems.”

Vivek adds, “We’ve also partnered with a leading mobile payment aggregator to allow shopkeepers to do mobile, DTH recharges, bill payments, money transfers and more. It’s been helping shopkeepers see an increased footfall of about 30 per cent, which obviously gives them better sales because of their presence in the shop.”

The technology is completely free for retailers, with the company planning on making money through other means. “The entire sector mostly works on a 10 per cent margin, but with rent and electricity it comes to as low as 7 to 8 per cent. So we plan to later monetise our product through data, by tying up with other companies to sell their products and more,” Vivek explains.

The duo also plans on taking Nukkad Shops national within the next couple of years. Vivek says, “We want to take our technology to around 200,000 shops in the next three years. We plan to have a pan India presence in that time frame.”