No offers, but Mydala helps grocery shopping; founder Anisha Singh explains how

The Delhi-based discount coupon website Mydala recently added grocery listing as a vertical. The new vertical includes products from categories like eatables, personal care and household items. On the website it lists details of offers given by different brands at general stores. It has tied up with brands like Hindustan Unilever, P&G, Kelloggs, Sahara Q Shop, Zydus Wellness, Wipro, Nivea, Danone, etc.

Anisha Singh, Founder, Mydala, says there will be no discount coupons from Mydala in this new vertical. Instead, it will just be a listing of offers from FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) brands directly. So far, half a million unique visitors have either seen or used the grocery listings. In an interview with Firstbiz, Singh details her plans for the grocery vertical. Edited excerpts:

Buyers don’t get any offers from Mydala per se. So how is grocery listing useful for them?

We are always looking for ways to make life convenient for users. One of the things that we were getting a lot of request for was help with grocery shopping. So we talked to a number of FMCG companies. Since not many have an online presence, we got a good response from them.

The idea was to take them online and showcase their products and new offers to people. Usually the general store does not tell you about all the offers that are there on different products. This will solve that issue as buyers will know which brand is offering what [discounts> from the listings on Mydala. We are also letting users create their own grocery list in our app. People generally make their list on their phones, so now you can sync that with Mydala App and see what offers are available on them.

Will the offers be different in other states?

There are offers that are limited to specific states and there are some that are pan-India. All the listed offers are available in almost all the stores. There are exclusive offers for Mydala users which are available at certain stores like Sahara Q which gives five percent discount on shopping at a certain amount. Right now the idea is just to make grocery shopping convenient and a money-saver for users. What it does for an FMCG brand is that it allows them to disperse information directly to the buyer, which they were not able to do earlier. We get 35 million unique visitors on Mydala every month, out of which more than 50 percent of the traffic comes from tier II and tier III cities.

How will you monetise?

FMCG companies pay us to showcase their offers. A number of brands want to do promotion of new products as we have strong foothold in smaller towns through our app. We are doing special launches and sampling in select places in Maharashtra and Gujarat. We work with them on a revenue-sharing model. We also plan to include other online grocery stores in the future.