File photo of an Indian man seen carrying goods on his three-wheeler vehicle on the outskirts of Hyderabad, June 29, 2017. India is bracing for its most significant reform in a generation as the world’s fastest growing major economy is unified into a single market for the first time. (Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images)

Nukkad Shops, a tech startup based in Hyderabad, has set a target of onboarding 5,000 retailers by the end of this year.  The company is also looking at bringing 200 channel partners onboard by the end of this year, who will drive its sales need in tier-2 and 3 cities.

Currently, about 70 percent of its retailers are from big cities and remaining from tier-2 and 3 cities.

However, Nukkad Shops plans to change this ratio to 50:50 by the end of 2018, said Vivek Shukla, who founded Nukkad Shops in 2016 along with three others—Niranjan Kumar, Kulashekar Reddy and Vinodh Nair.

“We have set a target of onboarding 5,000 retailers by end of this year,” he said.

Shukla told reporters in Chandigarh, June 15, that the company’s aim was to make the grocery store owner more efficient and keep them on par with their bigger counterparts.

“While supermarkets and big stores are able to adopt the changing technologies with a lot of ease, our small neighborhood grocery stores have unconsciously been left behind. With a pursuit to make the grocery store owner more efficient and keep them on par with their bigger counterparts, the Nukkad Shops was founded,” he said.

Shukla said Nukkad Shops provide the whole ecosystem for retailers to become digitally independent and as part of this, it provides smart point-of-sale devices, printer and software through which the owner can monitor the inventory, the purchaser will get a list of items available in the shop and the whole billing system becomes seamless.

Meanwhile, the company provides customers with an app to book day-to-day groceries, get it home delivered and also keep an e-bill in case of return or exchange.

It has three different solutions based on segmentation Nukkad Shops Elite, Nukkad Shops Pro (segment B retail stores) and Nukkad Shops Aspire (segment C retail stores). 

While segment B refers to mid-range retail stores with a larger inventory, segment C refers to smaller stores.

“We started the commercial operations of the company in 2017 and since then we have onboarded 2,100+ retailers from Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. We have a footprint of one million unique customers along with 70+ channel partners,” he informed.