Near.Store, a plug and play hyper local platform for physical/offline stores, raises $300000 as seed funding from Sauce.vc and other individual investors. The platform enables shops to create an online presence, thus making its products easily discoverable in simple steps. This online presence & ability to be discovered by customers within close geographical vicinity helps the shops increase their sales. Moreover, the added convenience of online ordering also helps the shopkeepers in maintaining their customer’s loyalties.

Speaking on the occasion, Manu Chandra, Founder, Sauce.vc, says, “The Near.Store team has a deep and intrinsic understanding of the Indian Digital space and a proven history of creating and running successful companies. Kirana stores are the mainstay of India’s CPG landscape and getting them digital ready in a zero- effort manner holds great potential for the entire retail ecosystem”.

Being a part of the Near.Store platform is as easy as plugging in the Near.Store dongle into existing bar-code scanner/ billing system used by shop owners. Furthermore, the device does not even require any additional internet connection, software, electricity or lengthy implementation process.

Once connected, the device automatically uploads a shop’s products to create a web storefront. Now, with

The Near.Store team has a deep and intrinsic understanding of the Indian Digital space and a proven history of creating and running successful companies

every scan & bill generation, shop owners would be able to make each SKU, a part of their online product catalogue. This online product catalogue is then used by Near.Store for SEO, which in turn makes the store visible & discoverable to customers within a certain geographical reach. Shop owners receive all orders via their existing billing systems, with both offline & online mode of payments acceptable for order fulfillment.

Thus, in a short time, majority of the SKUs of the shop are captured in the digital database, without any additional resources or efforts to be made by shopkeepers. The digital database can be used by the shop owners for better inventory management as well.

“Most traditional stores on an average maintain 5 -10 thousand SKUs. For many stores, who have attempted to go online, the first step of uploading the SKUs is often daunting and acts as a deterrent. Additional requirements, such as need to have a continuous online promotion, maintaining a separate payment system etc. is equally challenging. At Near.Store, we have managed to simplify the process by introducing the dongle, which plugs itself in the existing system. Our users therefore do not need to assign extra resources for going online and can focus on increasing their sales with no extra effort,” concludes Ashish Kumar, Founder, Near.Store.

Currently in a pilot stage, Near.Store is present in two cities & aims to expand to over 10 cities in the next six months.