BigBasket crosses 5 mn customer milestone

Company is offering special prices on 20,000 products over the weekend to celebrate the event

India's largest grocery e-tailer BigBasket announced that it recently crossed the five million customer milestone and is offering special prices on a selection of 20,000 products to its customers over the weekend to celebrate the same.

BigBasket which has a presence across 26 cities in the country says it processes over 50,000 orders every day. In the past five years, the company says it has seen its monthly customer spend grow from Rs 500-800 to over Rs 2,000.

"We currently operate at 99.5 per cent fill rate and 99 per cent on-time delivery. With our guaranteed order fill rate and no-questions-asked return policy, we are happy to say that bigbasket has become a preferred choice for e-shoppers," said Vipul Parekh, co-founder at BigBasket.

In terms of sales, BigBasket says it has seen sales grow by over 300 per cent in the past one year and continues to grow at about 10 per cent on a monthly basis. The company largely services three types of purchases - large monthly bulk grocery purchases, quick deliveries of items such as milk and bread and specialty products from local stores or particular brands.

BigBasket's announcement comes at a time when large horizontal players Amazon and Flipkart are vying an entry into the grocery delivery space. Both giants are looking at getting customers hooked onto buying from their platforms, which will in-turn get them to buy items such as smartphones, apparel, large appliances and furniture from them.

Amazon has launched its Now and Pantry services which offer express deliveries of groceries and facilitate bulk buying from even restaurants and small kitchens respectively. The company is investing heavily in the businesses and has even partnered with local supermarkets to enable quick deliveries of products to customers.

BigBasket has so far raised $291 million in funding, a far cry from the $5 billion Amazon has committed to invest in the country and the $1.4 billion Flipkart raised last month from Tencent, eBay and Microsoft. However, the company has so far shown good growth and has been able to build private labels which contribute 35 per cent of its business today and should grow to 40 per cent by the end of the year.

Industry speculation points that BigBasket and closest rival Grofers are currently in talks to merge and take on both the large horizontal players. Japanese telecom-cum-investment giant Softbank is said to be interested in investing between $60-100 million in the merged entity at a valuation of around $700-800 million.

Softbank is currently orchestrating the sale of Snapdeal to larger rival Flipkart and could invest up to $1.5 billion in the merged entity to pick up double digit stake in the company. With Flipkart already investing heavily to grow its grocery delivery service, it is to be seen if Softbank would put money behind a service that could rival another of its bets.