Kishore Biyani-led Future Group seems to be looking to take on online grocery players as part of its latest retail 3.0 strategy. According to a report in Economic Times, the brick-and-mortar retail giant is looking to launch an ecommerce app for its EasyDay members on the lines of Amazon Prime.
The app will allow customer to purchase grocery items such as vegetables, fruits, dairy, staples, etc and the retailer will be using its EasyDay stores for delivery. This service will take on players such as BigBasket, Grofers and Amazon Now.
Vinay Bhatia, CEO of group loyalty and analytics, Future Group told ET that the company believes selling fruits and vegetables is a great way to get frequent customers as they are daily needs.
The app is likely to be launched in the next few weeks, giving users the convenience of ordering grocery from their homes.
Future Group has plans in place to aggressively expand its network of EasyDay stores to be able to serve customers. With over 950 stores currently, Future Group plans to expand this to at least 10,000 by 2022.
Similar to Amazon Prime subscription, the Easyday club membership programme comes at Rs 999 for an annual membership, as part of which members get 10% discount on all purchases.
Interestingly, this isn’t Future Group’s first attempt at ecommerce. It tried its luck with Future Bazaar and Big Bazaar Direct, which didn’t take off. It also tried getting into online furniture through the acquisition of FabFurnish, another attempt that failed.
The online grocery space, however, has been seeing immense traction over the past few months. Apart from incumbents such as BigBasket and Grofers growing aggressively, Amazon has also been attempting to make it big in this space. Flipkart too relaunched its food and staples category recently.
As per the ET report, Morgan Stanley expects the grocery and food delivery market to reach an online penetration rate of 4% by 2020, touching gross merchandise (GMV) of $19 billion.