Learn how OOFFRR is giving food industry giants like Zomato and Swiggy tough competition with its distinctive marketing strategy

Pradeep Shukla
Founder- OOFFRR
Brief us about your business model?

It’s an old saying “Necessity is the mother of all inventions”, so true in our context. There had been many times in my past when I wanted to go outside to purchase something or maybe even eat something in the markets near to me. But ended up ordering online for the things I wanted. Even though the food arrived cold or crushed or the goods arrived damaged or not in time, I had no choice but had to order online since the savings on online made sense. For past few years this kept hitting my head and I knew I had to find a solution to beat this. Finally I cracked it and created “OOFFRR” App and platform.

How does it work (step by step procedure)?

It has a very simple mechanism. Merchants are taken onboard with a very small amount of Monthly pre-paid subscription (Ranges from INR 300 to INR 4500) per month. They get listed and they are also given rights to put unlimited deals, offers and discounts on our App. They are provided with a full working backend App without the UI. They control everything from there. There are many services offered to them apart from the sales potential generated for them.
We in turn have Geo-fenced markets by using coordinates (Longitude and Latitude). These merchants’ shops and their offers are visible to people who have downloaded our App and are looking for discounts. Customers can browse through many categories available on the App and choose the offer they want by simple press of a “Redeem” button on the App, they generate a 4 digit OTP which is given to the merchant.  Merchant enters the OTP in its backend App and the deal is confirmed. Simple. Now the merchant can give the deal to customer on the discounted price and customer can pay directly to the merchant. It makes both customers and Merchants happy since they are face to face and deals are done directly using our platform.

How do you look at expansion?

We have just completed our Beta testing about one and half months back. We are getting super response from our Merchants and Customers alike. In the whole life cycle of the product (which is just 3 months), we have got downloads close to 9 Thousand and more than 250 merchants onboard. There are around 6 Geo Fenced fully functional market clusters now in West Delhi. We are looking to expand to the NCR first and then move down south to Bengaluru and then to all Tier-1 cities across India. After that we will focus on Other Tier cities.
In this fiscal we plan to have close to 8-10K merchants onboard our App and are eyeing at least half a million in App downloads.

What are your marketing plans?

We are currently focusing on word of mouth marketing plan. We also have our sales team on ground and they are working on getting Merchants and Customer onboard. We are also running focused online campaigns and coverage in media has also started for us. It seems that marketing plans are falling in place from the response till now.

How are you different from the existing competitors and what is your strategy to compete with them?

Do we have a competitor? Yes and No. Yes, there are some players that offers discounts to customer when the customers pay them on their App and take discount from Merchant. Both merchants and the customers are the losers here. Customer has to pay upfront without even looking at the product, just based on the description or picture of the product before they can avail the services or the products and maybe they come out dissatisfied out of the deal. Merchants are also on the losing end when they do not get the money on the same day and pay the platform commission on each sales. They get their money from the platform in 2-7 days after deducting commissions.
We have always been the advocates for the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) strategy. We have no commissions charges for Merchants or Customers and they both are happy. Merchants have just to pay the monthly Pre-paid subscription as low as INR 300/Month.

How have people responded so far?

Both our Merchants and Customers are very excited, customers are loving us for the direct payment policy and exclusive discounts they get for things for which they earlier had to shell out on MRP or full prices without discounts. Merchants are very happy to get a gourmet of services apart from sales and direct payments from customers without their payment being held up for a week. They are also their own masters, they can add, delete or change any offers and get business analytics twice a week from our tech teams.

What is your plan for next 5 years? 

Expansion is on top of our minds. We have plans for this year, which is now being implemented. By next five years we plan to cover almost all the towns in India and move on to villages which are turning around and becoming town. We plan to have at least 350 Cities and almost like 4000 Clusters for our customers to save on each time they go to the markets. We will generate good employment in achieving these goals. We plan to have at least 50 Million downloads in next 5 years when this becomes the word of mouth to all the people who love flogging the markets.

What are the traction details (like users, app downloads & other achievements of the company)?

Currently we have about 9 thousand users of which around 5 thousand are active at any given day. Daily downloads are crossing 150 mark. We have at least 50-70 daily redeems or actual transactions. More than 250 merchants on board with numbers growing at least 20 per day. We have been covered by many media houses with a story covering us on Zee Business.