kirana stores 2.0

Covid-19 has brought the world to a stumbling halt. Normalcy has been thrown out the window and it is a no-brainer that digitization will be embraced globally, for personal interaction could be risky.

How does this affect small businesses? 

Hyper-local retail stores delve on personal interactions. What is in it for a tech giant like facebook?

Enter, Facebook Shops – Facebook’s integrated e-commerce platform. Here, anyone can directly purchase goods for delivery at home. Unlike Amazon, Facebook Shop can be utilised by anybody ranging from a large scale manufacturer to a small-kirana store. This is a new horizon to explore for hyper-local retail through this integration.

The burning question is, why will a kirana store owner want to shift to e-commerce? I mean, he/she is perfectly comfortable running their business via the telephone.

Right?

Well, e-commerce offers transparency, ease of organising the inventory, ease of order tracking for the consumer and the shop owner. These key features will play a major role in enabling increased efficiency for the kirana store owner and if facebook shop can play the role of being the catalyst, then why not?

An Instagram study reveals more than 36% small businesses around the world, leverage Facebook shop to sell their products. While this feature is being rolled out in stages, given the size of their market in India, it is sure to disrupt one of India’s largest and most unorganized sectors.

With more than 336 million people in India hooked onto Social Media, Facebook Shop offers unmatched visibility for small brands trying to make a mark. For instance, all of us go to our nearest kirana store for our staples – milk, curd, rice, water can, oil and more. Imagine a reality where your favourite annachi kadai delivers to your doorstep from the comfort of your app, sitting miles away at work or while on vacation. It will be a welcome and most importantly, safe disruption from the norm. Given the central ownership of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, integrating Facebook Shop with a WhatsApp for business account also becomes seamless enabling easy and immediate communication. A win-win for the consumer and the shop-owner alike. 

With Athmanirbhartha doing the rounds and the ideology of self reliance being pushed aggressively, we can expect the Indian government to start promoting Indian products and curbing the import of foreign products. This spells advantageous for Kirana owners, for their inventories are small and they will be more agile to adapt. This agility combined with Facebook’s flexibility will ensure consistent pay-days for these hyper local retailers. 

However, facebook shop will have to overcome ‘conditioned indian minds’ in order to see widespread buy-in for their e-commerce module. Till date, kirana owners have never needed to use computers let alone using facebook and it’s complicated business manager dashboard. How is facebook going to address this issue? It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, given that kirana stores will also require constant updation of their inventory owing to the nature of the goods they sell and it will be an uphill battle for facebook to de-condition these institutionalised shop owners. 

One workaround I can think of is the government collaborating with the e-commerce provider to offer training, awareness and more, but given facebook’s propensity for data theft and with facebook shop seeking your credit card details, it sounds all the more scary. 

With so many questions doing the rounds, we’ll have to wait and watch how the future shapes up. One thing is for certain though, whether or not hyper local retailers will benefit directly, small mom and pop stores in and around will surely find it useful.