Seniority’s co-founders Tapan Mishra and Ayush AgrawalAiming to bridge the gap between India’s considerable population of senior citizens and a lack of retail companies to cater to them, an e-commerce platform, Seniority, will provide a platform containing all products for this segment of the population, which has shown an increase in spending power in recent years.
The company’s growth can be traced to an in-house competition by RPG Ventures – the venture arm of the RPG Group — three years ago. The co-founder of Seniority, Ayush Agarwal, was then working with the marketing division of CEAT Specialties, one of the companies of the group.
“The idea of an e-commerce portal to curate all available products targeted at senior citizens was accepted by the board, which agreed to invest in it after several rounds of interviews,” he said. He was joined by Tapan Mishra, the other co-founder, who was then heading operations for Bioworld Retail — an international licensing and merchandising company.
Elaborating on the concept, the duo pointed out that estimates have put the product segment aimed at senior citizens at a whopping $1-2 billion. “India alone has around 120 million senior citizens, who in turn would have around 250 million children willing to spend on them,” he said.
He said the nuclear family structure has given rise to a new class of senior citizens who have both spending power and the will to spend on themselves. Agarwal pointed out how special tours are now being offered by tour operators for people of that age group.
“While products ranging from healthcare to leisure and lifestyle aimed at senior citizens were available in the market, there was a lack of a platform where all of them would be available. Our platform can be used for both discovery and purchase of such products,” he said.
At present over 6,000 products from 200-plus vendors are listed on the platform. Around 15 per cent of the products is from out-of-India players. Other than healthcare and assisted-living products, the platform also caters to the lifestyle and leisure needs of senior citizens. The website also has options which allow customers to talk to representatives who can walk them through their shopping. Seniority also has two brick-and-mortar stores — one in Pune and the other in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
“We have plans to open stores in NCR region also,” said the co-founders.
RPG Ventures has invested around $4-5 million in this startup, with Agarwal claiming that they receive 1,000 orders per day. The average ticket size of the order is around Rs 1,500. Most of the payment is done through Cash on Delivery (CoD) mode.
