Grocery shopping via mobile: A new & refreshing approach

AaramShop's mobile app brings a new perspective to market place apps. The app is unique in its approach in enabling consumers to select their preferred retailer in their neighborhood and then shop with that retailer.

The app upgrades thousands of neighborhood grocers via mobile apps and bring them on mobile devices of consumers along with their inventories and offers, enabling consumers to discover and then shop.

The app is currently available only for android devices and iOS app is expected over the next few weeks. 

Download the app from here.

What Indian Internet Businesses Need: Article in CIO featuring Ritesh Raj Gupta

It is estimated that around 3.74 lakh tickets are booked on IRCTC in a day. Despite the reported sluggishness of the site, it is the best possible proof of the Internet’s growing popularity and dependence in India.  

India has around 150 million Internet users, and that’s just at a mere 12 percent penetration rate. Despite that, it is the third-largest Internet population in the world, behind China and the U.S. New online retailers are mushrooming virtually every month, and growth in Internet usage is mainly driven by mobile, social, and tablet usage.

Till now, Internet in India was just a numbers game. But that’s about to change.

E-commerce giants around the country are struggling to please an uber-demanding and price-sensitive market, while keeping a competitive edge. The general lack of infrastructure pertaining to logistics, distribution, and highly available and cost-effective bandwidth in India is soon set to make the business model unsustainable.

In the current ecosystem, businesses report high costs of logistics and servicing clients. Inadequate systems for online payment and transaction further hinder the experience for users. And finally, cheap and easy access to Internet is still a distant dream.

CIOs in the industry are increasingly turning to BI, analytics, and mobility solutions to identify the gaps in customer experience, and turning to IT to fill those gaps. But, in this game, the government of India is a very crucial player. And, as is evident from the growing numbers of IRCTC, it will alsagazineo be the biggest gainer.

The CIO magazine spoke to the CIOs of some of India’s leading e-commerce companies regarding what India’s Internet businesses need, and this is what they said:

Ritesh Raj Gupta, Vice President, AaramShop

“Internet-driven business is an opportunity that needs to be tapped into by every physical business. Internet has to be one of the key channels in a multi-channel strategy. For us at AaramShop, therefore, grocery retailing on the Internet is not the preserve of a few, but the opportunity which has to be made available to millions of retailers across the country and their consumers.”

Ranjit Satyanath, Customer Care Associate and Sr. General Manager, Solutions and Technology, Shoppers Stop

“Currently, people buy things online for convenience and discounts. While the former benefit should continue into the future, online players won’t be able sustain giving discounts for very long. They are now trying to differentiate themselves on assortment, user-experience and quality of service.

The challenge facing the industry today is the general lack of infrastructure in the country with respect to distribution and logistics. Add to that the Quixotic tax regime we have inIndia. Online retailers are also finding it tough to attract and retain talent because in our country, startups are generally perceived as risky career options and not without good reason—this is often reflected in the user-experience on Indian sites. I also think that Indian online retailers give more importance to features than to design and user-experience.”

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Six Reasons Why You Should Care About Social News

Social news is a type of social media website. Submitted links are the centerpiece of this type of social media.

Three core features of social news:

1. Users submit links to articles, photos, videos, etc.
2. Users vote on submitted content.
3. Highest rated content is featured on the homepage.

Some of the more popular social news sites areDigg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.

Here are 6 reasons why social news matters for your business or website.

1. Massive Amounts of Traffic

The biggest attraction of social news sites is the massive amount of traffic they can bring in a short period of time. It can be upwards of 50,000+ page views in a single day. Getting on the homepage of Digg once often wakes up an addict-like craving in the webmaster to "go popular" again.

Unfortunately, most of those 50k readers from a social news site will immediately leave your site after reading the article. Without clicking on any ads, looking around the site, or buying any products (or subscribing to your feed). On top of that, having thousands of them visiting your site at the same time might kill your web server. Some people come right out and say Digg traffic sucks.

Yes, the vast majority of social news visitors won't "convert" (whatever that means to your particular website), but they're still worth it because of what comes after the massive wave of traffic.

Besides, who would rather not get those 50,000 page views? Not me.

2. Bump in Subscribers and Regular Readers

The biggest social news sites like Digg or Reddit can send upwards of 50,000 page views in a single day. It's a big win even if only 1% of the primary traffic spike finds your site interesting enough to bookmark, subscribe, share, or blog about. That's potentially 500 new subscribers or sales!

The good news is that we can expect the conversion rate to increase as more niche social news sites pop up. Instead of massive, non-sticky traffic, the social news sites of the (near) future will send smaller bursts of highly targeted traffic that will be much more likely to click around your site and/or subscribe to your feed or newsletter.

3. Inbound Links and Targeted Traffic

In addition to the bump in subscribers or bookmarks, you can expect a wave of new inbound links.

Those new inbound links (a vote of confidence for your site) will send a secondary wave of traffic. This wave will be smaller, but it will be highly targeted traffic.

The links themselves add significant long-term value because the number and relevancy of inbound links to your website directly determines how well you rank in search engine results.

4. High Return On Investment

When done properly, a social media campaign can provide a very high ROI.

You can spend a day or so writing one article. If that article goes popular on one or more social sites, you can expect thousands of visitors and links.

Going with our previous estimate of a 1% conversion rate, compare a successful social news campaign with the cost of acquiring 500 new subscribers or customers. How many comments would you have to leave on other blogs? How many clicks (and how much per click) would you have to pay to get that kind of sales bump?

5. Establish Your Online Brand / Reputation

If you are an insanely helpful and interesting contributor to the community, you can build quite a following in your niche. Having potential customers see you as an industry/niche leader is a very big competitive advantage.

A social news site is just another form of an online community. The same strategies and benefits of successful forum marketing apply to social media sites. Be helpful. Don't rock the boat. Don't over-promote yourself.

6. Social News Is The Future -- And We Need More Thought Leaders

Social media is still in its infancy. The field is currently dominated by tech and humor centric sites that appeal to an early adopter user base.

But it's expanding. Social news is getting more mainstream everyday. Within 5 years, we'll see a social news site for every conceivable topical or business niche.

Whether you sell Harry Potter books or write a blog about rare orchids, there's probably a social news site being built (or already built) for you. Social news is expanding into an ever larger number of niches. And we're going to need thought leaders in every niche.

Sites like Mixx let users create their own categories, and only see those categories on the Mixx homepage. This feature lets users basically "create their own" social news site. Digg is planning to roll out a similar feature within a few months, and Reddit has recently open sourced its source code for anyone to use. Other open source software like Pligg and Drigg are already powering niche social news sites.

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State of Online Grocery Shopping Report: India

Here is a comprehensive view on the Indian consumers’ behavior and brand preferences when it comes to online grocery buying. In the SOGS Report: India, findings have been presented in terms of four broad parameters:

1. Who is buying groceries online? – SOGS report dives into demographic details of the shoppers, like gender & age.

2. Where are the buyers coming from? (With the current report restricted to the National Capital Region)

3. When they are shoppers buying the groceries?

4. What categories and brands are they buying? – Comprehensively explores categories and sub-categories and the top selling brands within them.

You can download the SOGS report from here.

Changing the way India shops for it's daily groceries! The AaramShop way!

The phrase ´The World is getting Online" has been given another dimension in India where you see you nearby ´Kirana Store´(Mom & Pop Stores) online and ready to take your orders through your facebook account and set to deliver at your preferred time to your doorstep at no extra cost. This has been made possible through ´Aaramshop.com´,(Hindi for Comfort + Shop) a website that is more of a hybrid retail platform that gives you choice of thousands of products and brands to choose from for your grocery.

The Online shopping has increased significantly over the last few years in India and is fast catching the trend. The consumers that AaramShop plans to address is 25 to 45 years of age, urban, females and males, professionals or well qualified "home maker by choice", technology friendly, habitual users of computer and other connected devices and is definitely on Facebook along with her peer network. This consumer can log on the platform using their facebook accounts and then shop for the products they want to buy, they can then choose their nearby Kirana Store (Mom & Pop Stores) from our listed stores along with the preferred time of the delivery. This ´Kiranawala´ (Mom & Pop Stores)would be informed about the order and it would be delivered to the doorstep at the time mentioned with the payment of cash only on delivery with no cost escalations.

AaramShop is a web-store to your door solution for all branded groceries products. In this way the consumer would be much more informed about various other brands that are available for the same product and also their pricing. AaramShop has been build keeping in mind consumers trust on their social networks and the brand recommendations that the networks make, thus helping is arriving at a better choice. Also since it can be done while you spend your time on facebook chatting with your friends it becomes an extremely easy and convenient way to shop for your groceries."

Next on the agenda is mobile based applications along with a lot of other web based applications like brand specific widegets and analytics.

Check out this site, www.aaramshop.com for more information