Bringing organised retail to gullies of India
Would a 7-eleven type store work in Bharat? 🇮🇳
2023
The Challenge
Running a supermarket on spreadsheets 📉
At superk, franchise owners were running supermarkets with fragmented tools, spreadsheets, and manual processes.
They lacked real-time visibility into financials, inventory, procurement, and returns, which led to stock mismatches, poor catalogue availability, operational friction, and early merchant churn.
🔴 User Pain
- No single source of truth for store operations
- Inventory audits and returns were slow, error-prone, and manual
🔴 Business Pain
- Fragile early retention
- Inconsistent demand fulfillment across locations
The Solution
A merchant OS that retailers will thrive on 🧱
Built the merchant partner product across web + mobile, building software that behaved more like an operating system than a reporting layer.
🧩 what I had built
Shipped 8+ core modules covering:
- Financials : invoice ledger, earnings reports
- Procurement : catalogue, cart/checkout, returns, new product requests
- Inventory : stock audits, inventory visibility
Built no-code / low-code internal apps to:
- Run inventory audits at scale across stores
- Manage role-based access for merchant teams
- Track physical assets (crates, containers)
- Monitor orders and returns via ops dashboards
Conceptualized and implemented a rules engine to dynamically control catalogue visibility, returns eligibility, and replenishment logic across 10K+ products and 150+ franchise locations
How I worked
- Tight loops with ops, supply, and engineering to translate on-ground chaos into systems
- Biased toward configurable tools over hard-coded logic to scale faster with fewer engineers
- Optimized for merchant trust first, growth second
The Outcome
- 83.3% monthly retention for newly onboarded merchants
- 75% CSAT, driven by better control and visibility for store owners
- Improved catalogue quality, returns handling, and replenishment accuracy at scale
- Learned how small operational primitives (rules, audits, access control) compound into massive retention wins
- Set the foundation for future merchant tooling by proving that ops-heavy B2B products win on clarity + reliability