United Villages, however, is now leveraging mobile technology to reach outlying villages throughout India. The firm's staff discuss products with retailers in small villages and use their mobiles to immediately place orders. At the warehouse, United Villages picks and packs orders in boxes for each retail location, and speeds the purchases back to the stores where shoppers can buy what they need.
Big companies usually can't afford to visit individual retailers in outlying areas, but United Villages can--and fast order delivery is important to the store owners, who want fast inventory turns for cash-flow reasons. Such an arrangement also saves store owners from having to close their stores and pay to travel to a market or wholesaler location.
This isn't the first time United Villages has targeted rural shoppers, as you can see from the 2007 interview with Amir Alexander Hasson, one of the founders. United Villages has also been working on providing rural India with telecentres and e-mail access for several years. Will this distribution approach become popular and spread to other nations?
