Meet the SHEROES - Shalini Bist

Shalini Bist worked with Tata Consultancy Services for 2 years as an Analyst developing an expertise in SAP Business Intelligence & Business Objects. The major work modules consisted of analyzing the Business data, cleansing & extracting for use in reporting to analyse the trends, revenue, sales, classification of customers, YTD data extraction

She is now using this knowledge in WEstaple & developing great customer trends depending on their buying capacity, the choice of products, the range of products they buy, the monthly shopping date etc.

Tell us more about yourself.

Optimist & cheerful in every moment of life. I love to dream, actually bigger than what I read. Avid reader. My time becomes beautiful if I see myself creating a better world. I personally believe - bringing small things together and making it big is the best thing one can do.

What is the story behind starting up We Staple?

There are couple of instances which led to the inception of this idea, and my cofounder made it concrete with his efforts. While going to supermarkets we have started feeling a discontentment and chaos. One day while shopping in a supermarket I saw a lady with a baby in her arm, struggling with the cart stacked with items, because of the rush her baby started crying which led to her mental breakdown and she eventually started weeping. I saw how helpless she was when I helped her with the cart and dropped it to her car. A thought ran in my mind to help everyone like this. We wanted to change the way people shop groceries every other day/week, no lugging, no long queues, it should be fun, it should be easy, and we then contemplated around the idea and finally came up with westaple.com. This name came to us as “we wanted to cater all basic necessities of a family ~ we-staple”

The idea was great but pretty difficult in itself, we were about to deal with five major modules in themselves, all of them different in characteristics – A website, Supply chain, Logistics , Customer Education & Acquisition & Warehouse Management, which we all were unfamiliar of. This turned out to be very complex online business of its type. We got intrigued with idea of doing something new and kind of impossible.

How are you different from other e-commerce retail groceries?

Continuously evolving-

It’s been more than a year and all this time has been a learning each day, every other day we had an impossible task to accomplish. Today westaple.com has its very own last mile delivery solution & own large warehouse. Our own logistics allow us to adhere to the stringent 3 hours delivery timing anywhere in Noida. We maintain a direct contact with the FMCG giants for sourcing Items which makes us different so that we can benefit customers to the maximum we can.

We love creating what customers want-

We are now a team comprising engineers and Operations’ executives. We simply follow a customer centric approach so that every touch point with us is at ease with handcrafted customisations. Our Customers find a pleasure ordering from WeStaple with easily searchable products.

Majority of our orders come online which makes believe that customers like us more every day. We are entirely different in our approach towards the business. We do not consider ourselves a grocery delivery company; we are a technology company solving a major problem of society which no major e-commerce players are even thinking about. We help people to live better and spend more time on things they love.

On average a family spends 7-8 hours every month only on groceries in addition to a significant amount of fuel and a lot of energy. We keep that in mind and gift that back to them.

Today we have a return rate of 55 % which is we believe is higher than any other e-commerce business.

Schedule your buying-

Westaple not only delivers but allows consumers to schedule their delivery as per their convenience. We keep a track internally about when our customers want their orders and accordingly deliver that. We have seen in some of the orders that our customers are buying groceries while they are on vacations and choose the delivery timings after 3 days when they are back.

Simple Re-order- all of us buy groceries each month. And we do the same exercise all over again. We have made reordering as simple as one click.

How do you see the business scaling?

Online retail is still in its nascent stage in India. With the exponential rate of internet penetration, it’s expecting a great fortune ahead. Groceries are a very hard to handle segment due to its perishable nature and irregular supply chain, moreover it is still a genre which is unexplored. People are happy because they get everything at their doorstep with comparatively lower prices & flexible payment modes. Our journey commenced with a core team of 2 members now expanded to 11, we cater every corner of Noida supplying their day-to-day needs. With a revenue growth of 70% (month on month) we haven’t yet covered even 5% of Noida’s population. We are yet to grow a lot in Noida and NCR. we plan to replicate our model in other metros as well. We work on analysing customer trends & provide them suitable products based on their history & selected choices. Our customers are really excited with the new revolutionised shopping method & want us to expand to a complete superstore with procuring vegetables & every item they need.

We recently launched a segment “The Festive Way-Navratri” with all the items ranging from snacks, authentic Kuttu Atta, Pooja essentials, vegetables, Pooja merchandise, Kanya gifts, sabudana food etc. The products were tested & verified for their quality; vegetables were cleaned with fresh water & then delivered .For Westaple quality of their products is at the top most priority. We plan to cater all our elite customers with an online festive collection benefit, so in order to shop their essentials, they don’t need to go out & waste their valuable time. Happy customers at Westaple proudly shop, schedule & flexibly pay for their products. Diwali festive collection launch was also superb.

A message to SHEROES out there

It’s clearly said that behind the success of every man there is a women striving hard to make him perfect, SHEROES is working for those super ladies who have done commendable work in their fields despite the society paradigm they face. It provides them with a platform to represent their talent, to let the world know their struggle & their journey to be at the epitome. It also helps women find flexible working timelines so that they can focus on their career & their family simultaneously which helps in decreasing the rate of woman leaving their prolific jobs for their families. I salute the effort which SHEROES has taken one of its kinds in India for the women power & representing it to the world that if you have that zeal to do it, nothing in the world can stop it.

I’m a female who has strength to feel charged and never backs down, today I feel proud to be a part of WeStaple.com because our country has SHEROES to strengthen more women like me.