Near.Store- A Smart Solution For Making Mom-and-pop Stores Digitised

Over the previous six months, social distancing has raised ecommerce to a very high level of significance. It was very difficult for the brands that supply to the stores to know their customers because there was no structured data consumed by their consumers.
In order to solve this problem, three people- Ashish Kumar, Ramakrishna A and Diwakar Mitr founded Near.Store in 2019 in Mumbai.
Near.Store is a plug-and-play device. It creates an instant online presence for a shop and makes them able to accept online orders and payments. In order to facilitate this, all that a shop needs to do is simply plug in the Near.Store device in their existing billing system.This startup works on the concept of increasing the business and customer interaction in a hyperlocal environment with the help of an app and website.

How They Began It

In 2006, Ashish and Ramakrishna, after completing their graduation from ISB Hyderabad, met Diwakar with the contact of some common friends. They stayed in contact and in 2019, they shared their own idea on launching this startup as per their own collective point of veiw, and finally they launched this in 2019.

Basically, there are two steps how a shop gets its presence digitally.

Step 1- Create an online catalogue of the items. For this, the shop owner has to pug in the dongle to the existing billing system of their shop. After that, the shop owner has to scan the products. Hence, a catalogue is generated.

Step 2- The product pictures get popular with the help of the library which Near.Store has in its backend. Now, with the help of the online catalogue, the store gets its another channel for accepting orders from the customers. 

Features Of Near.Store 

The setup of Near.Store enables the store owners for online payments, access to monthly credit and are able to transfer that to the customers also. Near.Store is serving 1000+ stores across Mumbai. Customers also receive update over email, SMS or WhatsApp. For the distribution of Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Near.Store is creating its alternate channel. This experiment is mainly being done for lots of young brands to be sold in kirana stores. 

Smart Working Of Near.Store 

On connecting the Near.Store dongle, all the products that a particular shop sells, are uploaded on a dedicated online store. Near.Store has the database of more than two lakh products along with their images and price range.

Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques predict and advise the member shops on the SKUs for increasing the sale of their products.

In January 2020, Near.Store launched the product during COVID-19 crisis, it helped kirana stores in continuing their sales during lockdown.

Future Aims of Near.Store

In India, there are more than 12 million small kirana stores. In accordance with the data of BCG, the retail industry in India is now of worth 750 billion dollars which is expected to touch 1 trillion dollars in upcoming five years.

But there only few companies which are focusing on the front-end tech for mom-and-pop shops. Near.Store is competetingh with SnapBizz, Mobisy and Jumbotail etc.

Currently, Near.Store is running in Mumbai and a few parts of Banglore. In upcoming one and half year, Near.Store has the aim of having its presence in more than four cities.