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AN INNOVATIVE PLATFORM THAT PUSHES OFFLINE RETAILERS TO DO BUSINESS ONLINE

Khushnud Khan and Rishi Raj Rathore, the co-founders of Arzooo, in an exclusive chat with NewsX, talk about their B2B commerce platform that has helped offline stores boost their sales.

NewsX was recently joined by Khushnud Khan and Rishi Raj Rathore, co-founders of Arzooo, a B2B commerce platform powering retail stores with technology. Rishi Raj Rathore began the interview by talking about their innovative online channel which has helped offline stores boost their sales.

“There’s a very interesting story behind Arzoo. We were passionate about building something which can touch the millions of lives out there and eventually created a business which can be a multi-billion dollar business, especially for the Indian market. And through our journey, while working in this category and for e-commerce giants, we realized that there’s a huge opportunity in this market, especially for electronics, where 90% of marketers go offline,” he said.

“These retailers are facing a lot of competition from the online giants on a day-to-day basis, but don’t have anyone to solve their problems. And there was a scope to build a big company out of that. So we thought of starting out and enabling these retailers with technology that we have in terms of e-commerce and fulfilment and create a big platform out of that,” he added.

Khushnud elaborated on the areas in which Arzoo has helped electronics stores get more sales. “Retail has been a sector where all the technological advancement has happened over the decades. It is where, in the last five or six years, Amazon and Flipkart and all the large e-commerce platforms have started, out of the large fragmented retail network across the country. India has a large number of these electronics retailers and they started feeling the heat because they are largely offline. The whole idea of Arzooo is to put all such retailers across the country on the same pedestal as Amazon and Flipkart, as far as the selection and range of the products are concerned and access to similar kinds of pricing,” said Khushnud.

Khushnud also elaborated on the biggest challenges that Arzoo faced, saying, “Like any startup, when we started out, we faced some typical challenges with building the platform, getting the right people to work, fulfilling the funding requirement. Moreover, because we were going to offline retailers who have been disconnected with technology and whom that technology has not reached, making them adapt to something as new as this was a bigger challenge for us. But, in the last four or five years, technology has made good inroads across the country. That has, to some extent, helped us.”

Talking about future plans to ramp up operations in other parts of the country, Khushnud said, “Currently, we are already operational across 20 states, but there are a few of the largest states which are left out. We are going to expand into those states. With the recent fundraising that we did, we raised about Rs 65 crores. Now we will move towards expansion, apart from product development and improving service quality.”

Talking about the factors that were given special emphasis while starting off Arzooo, he said, “We are dealing with a very high involvement purchase category which means that the whole buying journey for a customer finding a television or a refrigerator takes a week or ten days. And people had to visit multiple stores previously. So, we are enabling each store in a way that the moment one walks into a physical store, they should be able to end their shopping journey right there because that one store is equipped to offer them the largest selection and the best prices.”

Rathore added at this point, “We were trying to build a technology platform that we can give our retail partners. In the back-end, we built a sustainable model in terms of the whole supply chain. Secondly, we brought our logistics partners so we can track them in real-time, but also, we don’t have any direct vehicle or driver costs as such.”

Sharing the idea behind partnering with new consumer brands, Khushnud said “One of the things that our platform is doing for new brands and emerging entrepreneurs is taking them to our 10,000 retail outlets. There are five or six brands that we have launched in the current quarter, and there are more lined up to come on to our platform. Brands see a lot of value here because, with one platform, they are able to reach out to 10,000 retail stores with limited distribution costs.”

Talking about the current disruption caused by the global pandemic, Rishi Raj elaborated on how Arzoo has held up and the measures they took to sustain their business: “The pandemic was definitely a shocking situation for all of us. All of the businesses in India were affected by that. But in the long term, we realized that there’s a big opportunity, especially for a kind of platform digitalising all the retail stores across India and for helping retail stores acquire a lot of new customers and increase their sales. When footfall is low because of the pandemic, they can use Arzoo to sell their products online.”

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