Unity Store

Empowering local retailers

What if I tell you that you could visit a nearby kirana ( grocery or General store.) to buy a product and you get a discount as low as what you see in supermarkets and you don’t even have to buy in bulk without even going through the ruckus of searching products like how you do in supermarkets , and enjoy the same smooth transaction and feel with a discounted price .

Sounds great but looks illogical ! So here’s the business model.

Market Pain points I Recognised :

The Main form of competitive advantage that Supermarkets like Dmart and Big bazaar has the discount they offer to their customers. They order products in such a high quantity from the manufacturers that their selling price is less or equal to the cost price of many local retailers , and it is obvious that retail store owner can’t make such great order that too directly from the manufacturers they have to go through chain of wholesalers retail to buy their stocks thus leaving no chance to compete with the giants and ending up loosing a lot of money.

Unity store offers two business solutions:

Our MVP Product (A Unity store Vendor’s app ):

We will be taking orders on behalf of all local retailers in the city that will register with unity store (initially for the items that are long lasting and easily gets out of stock preferably packaged food , kitchen items and food raw material like edible oils and then place a mass order under the name of Unity store to our tie-ups manufacturers or those who provide best pricing for the mass order.

As we know ,

Cost per unit of a product ∝ 1/Lot size of the order placed

So by placing order in large quantity we can supply goods in cheap and affordable rates to retailers , thus their margin increases exponentially with time ,they can offer discount to the customers and thus have a healthy competition with the mega stores giants , without investing such a large capital.

This even provides us a competitive advantage as these stores are near to home , thus customers saves their money and time , they don’t have any kind of peer pressure and pay extra taxes and service charges . Thus providing a seamless experience that they are accustomed to from a very long time.

A Unity store Costumer App :

Via this app customers will be able to see all retail store near them , can place an order to them , apply for home delivery . Check if a product is available in store. They will also see recommendations offers and discount offered and ads according to their needs.

Market Demand:

According to report from Kearney Research, India’s retail industry will grow from US$ 800 billion in 2019 to US$ 1,407 billion by 2026 and more than US$ 1.8 trillion by 2030.

Revenue of India’s offline retailers, has an expected increase in revenue by Rs. 10,000–12,000 crore (US$ 1.39–2.77 billion) in FY20. India’s direct selling industry would be valued at US$ 2.14 billion by the top of 2021.

So , there is already a predefined full fledge working market that is running since decades without any major upgrade on Pan India level.

Thus Unity store will incorporate and try to update the current market trends by increasing sales , direct sellers revenue . Thus boosting the current market growth rate i.e. expected 9% for period 2019–2030 to about 12% by end of 2022 and 40% by the end of 2025.

Relevant Products in the market:

There are other similar products in market but they don’t really have the same sauce as of Unity store like Udaan and big basket those the same B2B thing but have an edge on it .

Udaan is a b2b platform that supplies good to retailers from wholesalers all over India ,its key usp’s are robust supply chain , and initial credit system ( provides products on credit to retailers).

While in case of Bigbasket they maintain their own inventory model and supply products directly to costumer house .

Target Customers:

Our target costumer will range from A to E2 class, i.e. from upper class to lower middle class while we are considering for online services and app using experience

Further, considering the B2B use case we will provide service to every retailers that signs up for our service .We have a vision to accelerate their growth rate and increase sale revenue and help them provide better costumer experience to their customers.

Required Resources and technologies :

For the purpose of this project we will be creating a web app portal for the b2b client , preferably the website will be hosted on AWS servers , technologies used will be react framework , mongo dB , NodeJS at backend . we may use fastify for faster experience and tailwind CSS for intriguing visuals .

Considering the case of inventory management we will prefer NVIDIA’S Enterprise AI solutions for advanced data analytics better supply chain management for lowering costs and delivery time , checking for better management of inventory Further.

We May use neural network and open cv library to implement computer vision solutions to make patterns of where the costumer’s eye move when he enters retail stores ( i.e. the products that catch his attention , so that same data can be used to recommend similar products.

Coming on to the Costumers app i.e. Unity store for normal users , we will be using react native to do parallel development for both android and iOS .

This app will use to determine the app user’s location:

Core Location Framework (for iOS) , Google’s Places API (for Android).

Solution:

Estimated Budget :

Considering the cost of development of both consumer and retail app , their will be $10k- $30k , further for maintaining the database and running cost we require an annual budget of $5K increasing according to the user base and size .

Additional $50k required to setup a buffer inventory and build a robust supply chain model to supply items efficiently at time , but this is to be done as we make good progress and have a better turnover in a few years.

We will require a seed funding round at start-up , but at most we will go up to max of c funding round.

Product pricing/Revenue model:

Both the products are going to free app based on different revenue model , while the main income stream is through the retail business model. Here are product pricing for each revenue stream:

· Free subscription to unity store consumer app and unity store retail app (based on premium and premium model)

· 20 % charges of the rate of manufacturer price in bulk for each item in stock for those who make orders on credit and 10% for those who make payment before supply is delivered.

· Ad revenue from the user data and product promotion from advertisers and sponsors will be secondary source of income.

Marketing Plan:

We will start to market with B2B business model first ,so will contact all retailers in the 20 km range of a supermarket that are being affected by their influence ,and when we have a handful of retailers to work with, we will take bulk order of most profitable items that are in competition with supermarket , since retailers will get product at higher margins than usual they are more like to work with us in future.

We will further sign a contract for long term tie ups with each store and build up the chain .

On the consumer side to make them aware we will use social media marketing for younger audience because they are available online, they easily provide data and can be track down and converted , but for the case of older audience we will have bill boards right next to store to make them aware and the retailers will also do the marketing with discounted price .Thus making them aware and converting them into clients used for future sales.

Risk Analysis:

Conversion rates for retail tie-ups can be low for some areas as they won’t give us orders for products until they have a trial ,so some store may need to be given products on credits. Building a supply chain will require a lot of investment so looking for long term investors will be a task we need to care about.

Milestone and Timeline:

We plan by capturing markets in metropolis and sub urban metropolis cities first , moving on to towns in next years as we grow. We try to capture and rebuild the whole retail supply chain , eliminating the middlemen .

We look forward to join with 10k stores every month after building a supply chain , and soon hold a position to be a unicorn company in few years with market growth expected as expected 9% for period 2019–2030 to about 12% by end of 2022 and 40% by the end of 2025 .