Across India, sales of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) are shifting online, particularly in urban environments where e-commerce sales contribute as much as 21 percent of all FMCG sales. Quick commerce — models that enable fulfillment of digital orders of everyday essentials in as little as 30 minutes — contributes up to 75 percent of these sales. Traditional retailers, including small neighborhood shops known locally as kirana stores, remain under pressure to compete. However, without the same scale or access to cost-saving technology as larger operators, they struggle to offer the same discounts and find themselves at a significant disadvantage. Consumers are increasingly turning to quick commerce platforms, and kirana stores are feeling the impact.

The looming threat of disintermediation

Traditional retailers remain at risk of disintermediation in the absence of broader ecosystem support to integrate them into the digital economy. This doesn’t just impact individual shopkeepers: kirana stores are deeply embedded in neighborhood economies, providing jobs and essential goods that meet daily household needs. They contribute meaningfully to India’s GDP, employment, and the way the country consumes. Bringing these retailers online enables them to continue delivering value to their local communities as consumer requirements shift.Bizom is a technology platform that digitizes the retail supply chain for over 750 FMCG brands and 10 million small retailers in India. Through Accion’s partnership with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, Accion and Bizom are collaborating to help kirana stores buy and sell online, enabling them to participate in a wider digital economy. We worked together to strengthen Bizom One, Bizom’s one-stop solution for buying and selling online. The platform links retailers to a wider range of products, unlocks access to a broader customer base through ONDC, and creates digital transaction records that help retailers access financial services. One lowers the barriers for small retailers to participate in digital commerce.

Transforming procurement through Bizom One: Helping retailers to buy inventory digitally

Traditionally, kirana stores rely on periodic visits from field sales teams to purchase inventory. Although rooted in strong face-to-face relationships, this approach is labor- and cost-intensive, preventing opportunities to pass through the same discounted pricing that other retail channels benefit from. It also means that kirana store owners have limited visibility into alternative products and pricing.

Bizom One transforms the inventory procurement process. It is a unified retail app for store owners to place and manage orders online. The platform is both asset-light (it does not own or hold any inventory) and brand-agnostic (allowing retailers to consolidate the brands they buy from in a single app), a rare combination that enables transparency, flexibility, and simplicity. It lets retailers order inventory directly from suppliers, track deliveries, which are fulfilled by local distributors, and access discounts and offers. They can also view their order history, invoices, and receipts, and use analytics tools to make better pricing and stock decisions.

Bizom One was piloted with an initial cohort of 40,000 kiranas, and early results showed meaningful benefits from platform use. Nearly 70 percent of a sample of surveyed retailers said Bizom One helped them save money, primarily through lower supplier prices, promotions, and discounts. Reported benefits grew with use: 96 percent of frequent users included in the survey reported saving money, and over 75 percent were more likely to cite saving time from a faster reordering experience. 

Helping kiranas to sell to a wider catchment of demand via ONDC integration

Through integration with India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Bizom is helping retailers build their online profile, catalog their products, and reach new customer segments to boost sales. ONDC connects buyers and sellers and allows transactions across platforms, creating an inclusive digital marketplace accessible to small retailers. Bizom One is a certified seller app on ONDC, so customers can find and order from these retailers using any commerce app that integrates with ONDC, or via QR codes posted by the retailers. Kirana shops become discoverable to new customers, while existing ones have a more convenient way to continue buying from their neighborhood shops.

Bizom One enables small retailers to participate in digital commerce without building technology or paying prohibitive fees. For many kirana store owners, these are significant obstacles to overcome, on top of navigating the shift to digital sales. To ease the transition, Bizom provides hands-on onboarding support, guiding new sellers through each step to ensure they understand the requirements and feel comfortable selling online. Furthermore, commonly used SKUs are pre-added within the app, making the process less cumbersome for retailers. For small retailers who are still predominantly offline, the lack of digital visibility and reliance on foot traffic can limit opportunities to reach new customers and compete with larger quick commerce platforms. Ninety percent of retailers surveyed reported an increase in selling volumes since starting to sell via ONDC. Tarun Goel, owner of Pawan Hyper Market, experienced these challenges firsthand. “We couldn’t really expand our customer base,” he said. After joining ONDC through Bizom One, the store processed over 1,500 online orders in its first month alone, generating ₹173,000 (around $1,800 USD) in revenue and boosting its typical performance by 23 percent. “There’s been a big difference in our sales,” Tarun noted. “We didn’t face any difficulty in recovering our setup costs, and our online customer base has increased.”

As more small retailers like Tarun begin transacting digitally, they also start building data trails that open doors to new financial opportunities.

Creating more resilient retail enterprises

In the future, Bizom will further expand the benefits it delivers to retailers through the Bizom One platform by integrating access to financial services such as credit. Through this integration, the company hopes to further bolster the resilience of retailers it services by leveraging their transactional history to enable responsibly designed loans, helping them overcome liquidity shortfalls and increase their buying power. As the platform evolves, Bizom plans to position the Bizom One offering as a “one-stop shop” that sets an example for the impact multiplier that can be achieved when mutually reinforcing financial and non-financial service offerings are bundled within a singular offering. By bringing thousands of retailers into the digital fold, coupled with credit to support their growth, we can enable small business owners to transform for a prosperous future.