From the last couple of years India has witnessed an exponential growth in hyper-local startups, easing things for customers. You could order food to your door step, electronics, and clothes to grocery to services.
Literally everything a person needs in his day to day life is now a click away. Who would have imagined having access to everything under the roof in an app? Among all the e-commerce players trying to be leaders hyper-local startups are giving the toughest competition to them.
The online shopping patterns of Indian customers have changed so drastically that the hyper-local startups are contending even with giants like eBay and Amazon .The prices are so competitive that the brick and mortar shops are losing their charm. Offers like refer a friend, cash backs, coupons are making us all glued to the application more than ever.
We have to admit, the hyper-local startups are creating abundant employment in all sectors viz, technology, sales to delivery and logistics. Also since they have efficient service and delivery market penetration they are extremely successful.
Just to quote an example, recently I have started reconstructing our family home; I get masons, plumbers, painters from apps like urban clap and localOye, since kitchen is under repair ended up ordering from delyver/swiggy, electronics and furniture using flipkart and pepperfry and groceries from Grofers or Bigbasket. Guess what? They even do your laundry! And all of this without going to the ATM, thanks to the paperless transactions. The customers are more confident using paperless transactions now, using means like Paytm or any e-wallet is so much more trust worthy now.
But the biggest threat for these hyper-local startups seems to be the bigger companies entering the same market. Ola has started their store, Paytm, ebay, flipkart are all looking to venture the same domain. It would be interesting to see how the startups compete with big players or rather the other way round.
There seems to be a very close and healthy competition to outperform each other.
As a customer we don’t have to wait in queue for grocery, movie tickets. No longer spending hours at the salon, wait for a table at the hotel, go looking for a carpenter or plumber, don’t have to worry about maid or get your house cleaned, and need a laundry its one click away.
Life is so much easier with hyper local startups, isn’t it?
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