Grofers Shuts Down Its Delivery Operations In 9 Cities

Grofers, the hyper local grocery delivery platform, has discontinued its delivery services in 9 cities across India. The move has been chalked up to less adoption of the services by the locals. After aggressive marketing campaigns to target customers in 15 smaller cities, Grofers has decided to discontinue its services in cities with reduced response rates. 

Marketing Campaign 

Company co-founder Albinder Dhindsa talking about the marketing campaign said, “We ran a series of marketing campaigns including television ads in these cities to test the markets and see if the volume picks up. The smaller cities are not ready for hyperlocal business yet, once they are, we will reconsider our strategy.” Grofers’ operations were shut down in Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Kochi, Ludhiana, Mysuru, Nashik, Rajkot and Visakhapatnam. Employees in those cities were offered similar position in other cities where Grofer’s currently has presence. 

Recent Funding 

The move comes after Grofers received $120 million in funding from Softbank last year taking the evaluation of the company to well over $400 million. The delivery service has also received backing from Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital. The total funding for Grofers, so far, has been estimated at $160 million. 

Current Model

Grofers is currently operating in 17 cities, down from 24 a few months back, including Agra, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kanpur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Delhi– NCR, Nagpur, Pune, Surat and Vadodara. Grofers has over 10,000 merchants in its database and processes around 30,000 orders daily from various cities as of November 2015.