SMALL BASKET: CITYMALL'S NO-FRILLS BET ON BHARAT

The company has been fine-tuning its operational playbook, but several challenges remain

- Samiksha Goel

(From left) CityMall co-founders Angad Kikla, Rahul Gill and Naisheel Verdhan. The company started in 2019.

A few months ago, Rupali Singh, a sales professional in Gurugram, placed a routine order for some staples on e-commerce platform CityMall. She was aware that the deliveries were sometimes late, but that was tolerable as long as the prices were good. On that day, however, no one showed up.

A week later, Singh noticed the order had been marked cancelled, allegedly because she had failed to answer calls from the delivery partner. But no one had called, and when she tried the phone number listed on the app for clarity, no one picked up. After raising a ticket, she received the number of a senior employee for her area. He admitted frankly that she was not at fault—the delivery partner assigned to her wasn't even in the system.

"Delays are fine. But cancelling the order with the wrong reason and giving no updates is not acceptable," she told Mint. She got refunded a few days later, but by then Singh had decided she was done with CityMall.

Singh isn’t the only one. When Ruby Kumari placed an order in Hajipur, Bihar, she was taken aback by the company's response after she complained about receiving an item past its expiry date. "I got a refund," she recalled, "but the customer care executive told me that I should check the order on delivery, and that they wouldn't refund the money again as per their internal policy. What if I'm ordering for my parents and they can't read?"

E-commerce in India's tier-2 and tier-3 towns has long been a difficult market to crack, constrained by low order values, fragmented demand, costly last-mile logistics and uneven digital comfort among consumers. Many have ventured down this path earlier, including Dealshare, but have failed to make headway or have fallen by the wayside.