Back in time we all knew how difficult it was to bring groceries from local markets. Our parents used to go for a walk every evening and bring groceries for us. It was the busiest hobby for all mothers back then. The E- commerce market was never established in India and had no scope also. Big basket was started by almost 5 founders. It had volume and frequency with high demand on daily bases across markets.
Initially it was a tough task and quick commerce was never in India. The founders decided to create an expensive supply chain process of farms, supply chain, warehouse, cold storage and finally customers. Everything was handled by a big basket from the initial time, the dependency was less on others. This made the project expensive and difficult to navigate in the initial stages of the business.As time moved ahead, the big basket captured the whole market by 40% and became the leader of the grocery industry. They have established in 25 cities across India with 1 lakh orders every day and their annual revenue reached up to 2000 crores per year. Alibaba, softbank had started investing in bigbasket due to its market share and customer base of 3 crore.
Then came Tata, which invested in bigbasket and took a 64% stake in the company. The business was working effectively and growing rapidly, but every journey has ups and downs, the competition from brands like blinkit, swiggy and zepto has started occupying space in the markets. The demand has increased across various platforms and other platforms for outsourced goods. The 10-minute delivery of groceries began by others, but the big basket never initiated for a long period of time. By the time they did, it was too late to make it consumer-friendly. The loyal customers of big baskets started switching to zepto and Blinkit, which reduced the big basket market share to 5%. Tata Group also stopped funding for big baskets. Once a market leader is now struggling to make a comeback.
