COVID-19 Effect On B2B Retail E-Commerce Case Study

Retailersbook is a B2B e-commerce( FMCG) startup connecting brands directly to retailers.

It aims to provide sales and distribution solutions for brands aiming presence in retail without
investing in the traditional distribution systems. The aim is to capture the maximum number
of retailers in the shortest possible time with the lowest cash burn. It has been tying up with
the highest channel partner present in any area for serving the inventory demand of retailers
to ensure hyperlocal operations for the same, keeping logistics cost to the basic minimum.

From the product side, it is aimed to have a salesman persona ensuring that the retailer
doesn’t have to deal with multiple salesmen and distributors to get his stock with uncertain
prices and sales time lost in getting the stock to the shop. Due to the recent situation of
lockdown and ramp up in demands it has been difficult for Retailersbook to get stock from its
company/distributor partners which in turn is resulting in the platform not able to serve all its
customers (retailers in this case).

Retailersbook doesn’t want to invest in buying stock as it had been operating on a

zero-inventory model keeping its investments low. The company founders are forecasting
that the situation is going to continue like this for the coming 3-4 months for big brands at
least. It has started onboarding multiple SMEs to deal with the gap in the supply of
essentials but still, it needs to have big brands as a hygiene factor in order to keep retailers
interested in the platform. We want to explore the short term (3 months) strategy and going
forward need strategic methods to best handle the situation for coming 3-6 months, 6-12
months and going forward after that. Following are a few ideas which can be explored for the
current scenario (just some food for thought)-

1. Direct deals with the companies (raising money as debt for the short term and invest it in
the booking of stock) to ensure big brands availability
2. Partnering with some SME manufacturing essentials like (Atta, rice and pulses) and rolling
out its own private label as a private label will have more chances of generating trails at this
time (​Covid-19 crisis may lead to emergence of new FMCG products: GCPL MD​)

3. Owning full distribution for some areas by operating as a traditional distributor with capital
investment

Info- Retailersbook started its pilot operations in Delhi/NCR from the month of October’19. It
started gaining good acceptance from both the seller and the retail side. By December the
company was able to have a retail base of 2000+ customers, 120 sellers and a GMV of
close to 4Cr+ with its two product ready ( Retailersbook is a retail side app enabling retailers
to refill their shops at the best prices ) and RB Express ( Supply-side logistics app aimed at
operational excellence as the company uses its own logistics and aims to bring its logistics
cost down to 1% for the secondary distribution which presently is around 3-4% in the
industry. It is funded by angel investors till now and aiming to have a monthly GMV of 25Cr
by the end of this year in Delhi.
Website- ​https://www.retailersbook.in/
App- ​Retailersbook

Expectation- Participants will have to send a ppt (maximum of 5 slides) on possible strategy
keeping in mind the present situation. Deadline is the 19th of April.

Note- Participants to have a chance of 8 weeks remote strategy internships at Retailersbook

along with the exciting cash prize