BigBasket is an Indian online grocery delivery service. The company primarily delivers grocery goods found in convenience stores, home essentials and food supplies to its customers.
Much before Flipkart tapped into the retail industry, a group of people (V.S. Sudhakar, Hari Menon, V.S. Ramesh, Vipul Parekh and Abhinay Choudhary,) fuelled with passion and experience on failure post the dot com bubble founded Big Basket, the country’s first online shopping platform which revolutionised the way people bought groceries. The five founders of this platform had their first experience in the e commerce side when they created Fabmart.com (an online platform to sell books, toys and groceries) in the year 1999. The online grocery division of this business was launched in 2001, and the company grew exceptionally. They also started a succession of grocery supermarkets called Fabmall in Southern India, which the Aditya Birla group acquired in 2006, rebranding it as More.
By 2011, the team thought of revaluating and trying their hand at something new again and despite all the criticism they received for this idea, the founders decided if they had to do anything, the time was now. It was a good thing they made this call because it was exactly at this time that the smartphone boom was happening and literally everything was available with the click of a button except for groceries. With all the investments it received, Bigbasket expanded the business including the smaller cities of India and also built several warehouses and invested in cold room facilities to enhance the range of fresh products. It also invested in technology to make delivery more efficient and shopping easier, both from the browser and mobile application. But amid the growing competition in the market form other companies, like Grofers and LocalBanya, Bigbasket started focussing more on personalized shopping. After deep research of years, Bigbasket figured out that the products in demand varied from city to city. This helped the company to put more emphasis on those products and expand the number of brands.
