E-grocery

This comes as a solution to the woes of the working housewives who do not have time to visit the ‘mandi’ for their supplies. Spending on grocery and daily essentials is the largest and most consistent share of the wallet for any household. But it was still out of the ambit of online shopping and, therefore, meant a huge opportunity for the innovators of Bigbasket.com, Ekstop.com and Localbanya.com

The key challenge is that most goods are perishable. They heavily bank on technology to manage their inventory and logistics. Bigbasket's systems look at sales pattern, suppliers' fill rate (the rate at which items are replaced) and seasonality before deciding the minimum inventory required to reduce inventory holding costs. "The entire ordering is done by our systems," says Parekh. All its delivery vans are fitted with GPS global positioning system) to track the vehicles, the time required to reach customers and so on.

Ekstop uses advanced software to track inventory turnover, credit days, sales per day per product to analyse whether a product is working or not. "Based on that, they decide whether to hold a product or not.

LocalBanya follows 'just-in-time' delivery model, where it aggregates orders on its site and buys goods in the evening to deliver those next day.

To cater to customers who wish to shop on the go, all three of these websites have mobile apps which were launched in the first week of November and are available on the Google Play store and the Apple App store.

Zomato.com

Zomato is an online restaurant discovery guide providing information on home delivery, dining-out, cafés and nightlife launched in 2008.

Zomato has two sections – restaurant guide and blog.

The revamped Zomato includes– restaurant search, users can maintain a food journal, reviews, social recommendation engine for restaurants. “They are deeply focused on helping people discover places to eat.

By January 2012, the company had over 3 million people visiting its site (which then listed 18,000 restaurants) every month.

Zomato has helped many small and medium sized restaurants be discoverable. Good reviews on Zomato helps these small and medium business owners to attract more customers and increase footfall.

In December 2011. Several restaurant operators approached Zomato, to help them sell New Year tickets. The website sold Rs. 8 crore worth of tickets.

On the product development front, a focus area is its mobile app development. Fairly obviously, people are often on the move while discovering places to eat out, so a mobile strategy becomes that much more important. By February 2014, Zomato had over 2.5 million downloads for its apps, proof that its mobile strategy is moving in the right direction.

Ola Cabs

Olacabs is a car rental company in Mumbai, Delhi providing cars on hire and taxi services for local, outstation and airport transfers.

Ola Cabs provides three different tiers of car service to suit different budgets: luxury sedan

models, mid-range, and its Ola Mini range which it claims is priced on the same level as the

humble auto rickshaw.

Ola Cabs allows customers to book on its website and even via a telephone number too. Right now, around half of bookings come via the hotline, but the number of mobile app users is increasing.

They implemented Oracle in 2004-05 when most car rental companies in India were still taking down bookings in long registers.

Ola drivers make the most of their idle time by logging on to this platform to increase their business as well.