How Online Grocery Stores Are Killing It In India During The COVID-19 Pandemic

An inspiring case study featuring Star Quik — a TATA product, originally published on WebEngage.

When COVID-19 is still throttling the world, there are certain businesses that are rising up and one of them is the hyper-local business. Which in short means the delivery business. With the lockdown in effect in the major countries of the world, these delivery apps and websites claim to deliver almost anything and everything at your doorstep by keeping all the safety measures in mind. It’s a good thing that crowds will stay in when only a handful of these delivery guys stay out to deliver the goods and earn the much-needed money!

So, how are these hyper-local businesses tackling the lockdown challenge? How are they still running strong and have pinned their towards the silver lining on the grey cloud hovering over the world? I will talk about these and many more things that the hyperlocal businesses have to package themselves with (especially during such times) with a help of a use case coming straight from the TATA house — the one that of Star Quik!

Note: I have accentuated the high points of the Star Quik case beneath, please pick up whatever goodness or strategies you can from it.

Starquik is a TATA group-owned entity. Through Starquik, India’s oldest conglomerate aims to deliver an omnichannel experience to their Starbazaar customers. Starbazaar is again a Tata-owned supermarket chain operating in multiple metropolitan cities across India.

The Objective

The online grocery retail in India is at a nascent stage and hasn’t penetrated even 1% of the market. And there are various deep-pocketed players primarily Grofers, Big Basket and Amazon, who are outspending each other to capture this expanding market. To congest the ring even more, there are established physical retailers such as DMart, Reliance Fresh, Godrej’s Nature Basket, etc. who are venturing into online retail in varying degrees.

Now we are hearing that even Flipkart, acquired by Walmart, is entering the race.

In the hindsight, the competition is way too much and differentiation is way too limited.

So Starquik, relatively a new player, concentrated its focus on converting their new visitors to customers. If a new user doesn’t convert then there is no way to contextually re-engage him and you would spend more money to reacquire that same user again.

Starquik wanted to increase the conversion at the top of the funnel and they used WebEngage to do that. Leading the effort was Gaurav Juneja, Cofounder at Starquik. In Gaurav’s own words “Our objective was to ensure that the users landing on the site are able to find the best of offers, and prompt users to quickly add to cart and build a meaty cart. Additionally, prompt the user to view cart with a specific coupon and push him to proceed to checkout”

The WebEngage Effect

Starquik created a customer journey that observed the actions of the new users on their first visit. If their actions didn’t converge to purchase, then the journey prompted them to do so by triggering contextual, real-time messages.

Here is the snapshot of the journey:

The impact of the Journey is summed up in the following image:

Now, let’s discuss each impact one by one.

a. Separate high-intent users from the rest

If the user has launched the website or app, enters his location but his location is not serviceable then he is immediately exited from the journey. Which means no nudges, no communication, email, push, nada. Exactly how it should be

However, if the entered location is indeed serviceable then he is treated differently.

For Starquik, setting the location was tantamount to expressing high intent, so they filtered such users at the very beginning and engaged them accordingly.

b. Increase cart value
If the user has logged in but not added to cart within the defined time period, then a notification is triggered that incentivizes him for purchase.

Moreover, as it is apparent from the above image, if the user has indeed added items to cart, then the journey nudged him to increase the cart size with the same incentive.

c. Encourage checkout

If adding to cart process is complete but not the checkout, then journey triggered a contextual message on his next visit that nudged him to check out.

d. Cross-channel engagement

Regardless of the device that the user is using to engage with Starquik, the messaging stayed consistent- a true cross-channel experience.

WebEngage’s journey designer gives Starquik the ability to design their cross-channel campaigns in a drag-and-drop fashion. So, accomplishing the cross-channel engagement was no more difficult than wanting to do it. Most importantly, they were getting the bird’s eye view of the entire communication strategy so they could instantly fix the flow anytime they wish.

The Result

The journey led to the uplift of 2300% in customer acquisition.

As you can clearly see from the results the control group users achieved net conversion of 0.17%. The same number for the users who entered the journey was 4.28%. This amounted to the total uplift of approx 2300%.

This was an unheard number even for us. Kudos to Gaurav and his team to be able to pull something like this.

Like we stated that online grocery retail penetration in India is way lesser than the other mature markets. This is despite the fact that other categories like travel, apparels etc. grew at an exponential pace. So at the moment, there are only as many customers you can sell to. Besides, given the fact that almost everyone is entering the race, retaining existing users is super important while being super challenging at the same time.

This is just one of the several journeys that Starquik is running in parallel to improve their retention. By virtue of our association, WebEngage is proud to be able to create a dent in India’s online grocery retail.

Key Takeaways

• Rely on your existing customer base
• Formulate and implement powerful retention strategies
• Understand your customers’ needs thoroughly and engage with them intelligently
• Leverage technology to scale up