Subzi Mandi, a 20 year old New York based grocery retail chain reached out to us during the lockdown to digitize their business. They didn’t have a clear vision but had a determination to move online digitally. We faced a variety of challenges faced by those in the grocery tech industry after which we developed niche technological solutions to help them.
Subzi Mandi never had a digital management of their inventory.
There were no defined product categories.
There were 12000+ products and no time to create a digital database manually. Losses in lockdown had to be minimized.
We extracted all their raw data of inventory from Point-of-sale into a CSV file.
The extracted and organised data was entered into the system from the back-end With our solutions, we not only created a digital inventory for them without much manual work, but we also did it within a record time.
We as a technical provider used data analysis to categorize their inventory and import it into the digital system.
Subzi Mandi had a product range of 12000+ items without images. For mitigating their operations to the digital markets, they needed to have a photo to show online but they didn’t.
In the mobile application that we have developed, we have added a direct photo uploading functionality with an embedded camera to solve this issue.
Subzi Mandi dealt with items that were in regular everyday use and thus there was very high rotation in offline physical sales which became a big headache while migrating online and created many problems.
We have integrated a stripe payment gateway with the functionality of authorization and capture. In simple terms,
We authorize the order amount from the credit card.
The store manager confirms the order and the availability of the product
In the capture process, the system won’t be able to charge the customer more than the authorized amount.
The final amount is debited from the customer after the confirmation from the store manager.
Each order the store received had 80+ items in the basket on average.
We developed a mobile application for the staff with two panels on the same screen- one containing a camera and one with the order list.
The camera scans the item barcode. Multiple scans for multi-quantity orders
The device ticks ‘yes’ or ‘no’ based on the availability.
Provide an alternate for the non-available items to the customer.
30 minutes time limit for the approval of the alternate items by the customer.
Have a logistics facility only for one hour to avoid extra cost.
Mismanagement limits the capacity of the orders that can be delivered thus leading to limited business
Delivery persons repeat routes while on the field thus wasting time
The store delivers orders in a 15-mile radius with delivery outsourced to gig-workers such as Uber delivery persons at a minimum wage of USD 15 per hour.
We divided the deliverable area of a 15-mile radius into four equal zones- A, B, C and D.
We sorted the zip codes as per the divided zones.
Sorted the orders in one zone in ascending order of radial distance from the store
Assigned one delivery person for every zone.
The store charges USD 15 per delivery
Gets 4 orders from a zone. i.e. 15*4 = USD 60
Store assigns one delivery person to cover the zone at the wage of USD 15 per hour.
Delivery takes 2 hours. Thus, delivery cost : 15*2 = USD 30
Profit = USD 60 - 30 = USD 30
Subzi Mandi came to us at a time when the whole world was shaken by the pandemic and lockdown. The digitization of businesses that had been slow till now had now accelerated all across the world and there was no time to waste. Subzi Mandi needed to go ahead with their online business before the lockdown opened or risk missing the bus.
We were able to support Subzi Mandi in their journey and provide innovative and comprehensive solutions to them for all the challenges faced in all steps of the order cycle such as order processing, logistics etc. Their large product catalogue, large order quantity and high rotation made it a daunting task but we were able to generate an average monthly sale of USD 80,000 in the first 3 months after we began working with them. Thus, we solved their problems and helped their 20-year-old offline business to venture into e-commerce.
