Big Basket is an e – grocery platform or marketplace which gathers groceries via stores and delivers them to buyers’ doorstep.

Bigbasket is among India’s most successful start-ups, having grown to become the country’s largest supermarket in just a few years. Despite the fact that Bigbasket’s founders began their business journey all around the time of the market collapse in 2000, they were successful in establishing themselves as one of the most popular online grocery retailers.

BigBasket Get your groceries at your door.
BigBasket Get your groceries at your door.

BigBasket specializes in delivering common cooking basics such as ghee (clarified butter), sliced coconut, and fragrant basmati rice to their consumers, with over 40,000 items ranging from bread to laundry detergents available for purchase and delivery. Their goal is to make food buying easier online so that people may escape traffic and the monotony of going to the supermarket.

From the failure of Fabmart.com to the success of BigBasket

In 2011, V.S. Sudhakar, Hari Menon, V.S. Ramesh, Vipul Parekh, and Abhinay Choudhari launched BigBasket with the help of their friends.

All this began when the founders of BigBasket decided to make use of the experience they gained following the dot-com bubble’s enormous demise. As a result, they made the decision to construct a one-of-a-kind website. When Big Basket launched Fabmart.com, all of the founders had relevant and recent e-commerce expertise.

In the year 1999, Fabmart.com was an online retailer of books, toys, and food. They quickly understood that not just our nation, but the entire globe, was not ready for the digitalization craze at the time.

Then comes the glorious year of 2011, when the squad regrouped and began re-evaluating the possibility of creating something fresh and amazing once more. Notwithstanding all of the criticism they got in 1999, they were adamant that now was the moment to do something which would put them on the map. In 2011, the smartphone industry was expanding, all was accessible for purchase, with the exception of groceries, of course. That was their Lightbulb moment, just there.

Expansion of BigBasket 

The company has also developed three new businesses: BB Daily, BB Instant, and BB Beauty, in order to explore new potential.

  • Customers can order milk and fresh goods through BB Daily, a subscription-based service. Customers must submit their orders by 10 p.m. to receive things between 5 and 7 a.m. the next day.
  • BigBasket’s unmanned vending machines, known as BB Instant, can be found in corporate offices, tech parks, and apartment buildings throughout Tier I cities.
  • BB Beauty, on the other hand, offers customers to select from a large choice of beauty and personal care goods and place orders online.

According to internal corporate communication, BigBasket will open its first physical store, “Fresho,” in Bangalore in the last week of October 2021. According to BigBasket co-founder VS Sudhakar, who informed all of the company’s employees, the specified store has been open to clients of Bangalore’s Basaveshwar Nagar since October 25, 2021.

The business model of BigBasket

Big Basket incorporates both an inventory approach and a hyper-local model to run their business.

  • The inventory model requires the corporation to purchase items from prominent suppliers such as P&G, HUL, mills, farmers, and others, store them in warehouses, and then deliver them to clients on demand. In the case of perishable items, they have agreements with local farmers and suppliers from whom they obtain commodities on demand and deliver to clients.
  • BigBasket has partnered with over 2000 grocery retailers throughout India to deliver items within one hour of the customer’s location under the ‘hyper-local model.’

Future of BigBasket

BigBasket is going to introduce its own rapid commerce offering, dubbed BBNow, in February 2022. Within the hyperlocal region, the new eCommerce solution will seek to deliver grocery supplies to clients in 18-20 minutes.

BBNow will be included in Tata’s future super app, TataNeu, as well as various other Tata products such as 1MG, Curefit, and others. Although the app will be meant to compete with Dunzo, Grofers, and Swiggy as a competitor in the same sector, it will be integrated into the BigBasket platform rather than being a spin-off.

The goal is to expand to 60,000 Product lines by 2022 and quadruple the number of farmers to 5,000. BigBasket’s private label assortment will be expanded as well, with Alibaba’s strength used to source and import a range of items six times that of large-format stores.