How to start an FMCG online marketplace in India

Are you an FMCG seller with an established brick-and-mortar store? 

Are you planning to launch your own multi vendor marketplace in India?

But do you have a complete business plan to start your FMCG online marketplace? 

If not, you must be wondering how other players did it all, and how you can sell FMCG online.

To help you out, let us first understand the Indian FMCG market with some statistics:

• $ 220 billion is the expected market value of the Indian FMCG industry by 2025
• ~$ 21 billion is the expected size of the D2C online FMCG market by 2025
• $ 70 billion is the expected Indian packaged food market by 2025
• 11% growth in the contribution of ecommerce to total FMCG sales by 2030
• 17% of the overall FMCG consumption among evolved buyers comes from ecommerce 
• ~10.7 million households bought FMCG products online during April 2020-March 2022

Source: ibef, Statista  

With the growing demand for online shopping, and with India being the world's fastest-growing grocery market, comes fresh opportunities for local vendors. The numbers strongly suggest how building your own multi vendor marketplace and digitizing the sales channel is a wise option for fast moving consumer goods enterprise brands. 

Reasons why FMCG online in India witnessed massive growth

Let’s look at some of the reasons that are contributing to the massive growth of online FMCG in India.

• Rising digital connectivity in cities and rural areas 
• Increase in disposable income in rural India
• Higher FDI investments in food processing and single-brand retail
• Rising brand awareness of household and personal care items
• Increased rural spending 
• Aid by government initiatives to increase financial inclusion

The FMCG industry has become an important contributor to India’s GDP. With the changing lifestyle today, people are more inclined towards buying online. Such online shopping habits are giving a boost to the Indian ecommerce industry with more and more growth opportunities for the businesses. 

How to start an FMCG online marketplace in India 

Are you ready to catch the hottest trend and kickstart your online journey by building a successful online marketplace? While creating an online marketplace in India is not an uphill task, coordinating the vendors, managing the inventories and running the business seamlessly is. FMCG brands need a well-rounded, feature-rich marketplace platform to streamline their business operations.  

Here is the 7 step-guide to start an FMCG online marketplace in India.

Create location-based stores 

Creating location-based stores for your FMCG multi vendor marketplace in India goes a long way. With hyperlocal multi location-based stores at your disposal, you can become a local favourite brand. 

Say you build an FMCG online marketplace and the business is catering to a huge geographical location. When you create multiple stores based on your customer’s geolocation, you can fulfill their demands and orders much faster. 

And if you are wondering how does going hyperlocal benefit your FMCG business, here are a few top reasons:

• Cost-effective solution to leverage dealers network without investing in various warehouses
• Easy to manage the vendors and delivery boys
• Quick to scale to new geo-locations
• Easily add new product-lines by onboarding local vendors
• Better conversions with fast delivery options
• Enhanced marketing ROI with personalized, location-specific deals
• Access to valuable customer data to plan strategic business moves
• Scope for quick brand popularity by word of mouth

StoreHippo offers a comprehensive locations-based store feature that enables your enterprise brand to create multiple sub stores. You can also handle multi-level discounts for your FMCG vendors and promote sales on your hyperlocal store by doing a local market analysis. StoreHippo also offers a host of tools to help you personalize the buyer journeys and achieve better customer engagement, retention and conversions. 

Onboard vendors from diverse brands and regions

Before you go ahead with any other step of creating a fast moving consumer goods multi vendor marketplace, you need to have quality vendors listed on your marketplace to build customer trust and credibility. Having vendors from diverse brands and regions helps you offer value for money to your customers.  

While it is important to onboard vendors, managing them is an uphill task as well. However, with StoreHippo’s systematic vendor management processes and tools, you can seamlessly manage them all. StoreHippo creates separate vendor dashboards for each seller, so they take charge of the entire sales process themselves, from display to delivery. Also, as an owner of the online marketplace, you have complete control over the approval of products your vendors are selling on the platform.  

Leverage mobile commerce

Did you know that 63% of mobile phone users prefer buying from a company owning a mobile app or mobile website? Well, most of the online searches happen on customer’s smartphones. Therefore becoming available on mobile phones can not be missed upon. 

When you create a FMCG products marketplace with StoreHippo, you can seamlessly build Android and iOS Apps right from the admin dashboard without any additional coding or cost. Built on a mobile-first approach, StoreHippo helps your FMCG customers to browse your website from any device or screen size. The stores created by StoreHippo are PWA stores that look, feel, and work like mobile apps even on entry level devices with low internet connectivity. 

Go Omnichannel 

Enterprise FMCG businesses need to offer a strong omnichannel customer engagement today. Wondering why? Because more than 80% of the enterprise brands were investing in omnichannel experience by 2020 as compared to 20% a few years ago. It is undeniably important to offer a multi-channel approach to the FMCG customers. 

By selling FMCG products omnichannel, you can also offer a personalized customer experience on each channel loved by your customers. When you create web pages with the buy now options, say on different social media pages, or put up any display board/kiosks in public areas, make shopping easy via wearable devices etc., you make buying fast moving consumer goods easy for the customers. 

StoreHippo offers a ready-to-use omnichannel enterprise ecommerce solution for your FMCG brand’s multi-channel selling needs. With such omnichannel solutions, you can easily strategize product-market mixes for faster growth and better audience engagement. You can quickly boost your customer engagement and increase their lifetime value.  

Opt for targeted marketing 

To build a successful FMCG multi vendor marketplace in India, you can try and test a variety of marketing strategies to drive traffic. However, the best marketing hack to run a successful hyperlocal fmcg products marketplace, you need to very specifically target your customers based on their preferences and purchase behaviour. 

With targeted marketing, you can seamlessly identify the right audience group for your products and develop marketing strategies to run location-based offers and promotions. StoreHippo comes with a gamut of marketing tools and features like a powerful discount engine, SEO tools, blog engine etc to help you plan a set of marketing strategies that can sell FMCG online seamlessly in the Indian ecommerce market. StoreHippo also offers personalized notifications, abandoned cart recovery etc to help you market your FMCG brand. You can also use the inbuilt blog engine from StoreHippo to publish a variety of content and build a unique brand presence. 

Make payments easy

The one important factor that FMCG marketplace brands must incorporate while building their online marketplaces is to make payments easy for their customers. With a seamless payment process, you can not only keep your customers happy but also boost your customer retention rates. 

With StoreHippo, you can eliminate the payment downtime on your FMCG online marketplace and never miss an opportunity to convert a potential sale. You can choose from over 60+ pre-integrated domestic payment gateways, netbanking, credit and debit cards, store wallet, COD etc. with StoreHippo making it easy and safe to accept payments using various channels.

Better shipping with multiple fulfilment partners

In a hyperlocal FMCG marketplace setup, quick delivery becomes a must. Mastering logistics can be a gamechanger when you plan to sell FMCG online in India. Customers would not like to wait for more than 24 hours to receive essential supplies like milk or bread. 

With an ecommerce platform like StoreHippo, you can choose from multiple shipping partners and automate your logistics processes making it easy to bulk upload products, track orders that are out for deliveries or arrange scheduled pickups for your carriers. StoreHippo also offers advanced delivery boy management software to help FMCG companies manage their fleet of delivery boys seamlessly. 

Conclusion

Growing leaps and bounds, the demanding FMCG online industry is ready to match pace with the changing buyer behaviour and to keep customers engaged and happy. However, you need to future-proof your brand by offering 360-degree ecommerce solutions for rapid growth. 

StoreHippo comes with enterprise grade 300+ features and tools to help you start a FMCG online marketplace in India. It helps you improve efficiency and reach a wider hyperlocal market while also reducing costs. 

Ready to sell FMCG online on a multi vendor marketplace in India? Explore the features from StoreHippo with a 14-day free trial.