AskMe.com acquires online grocery marketplace BestAtLowest

Getit Infomedia Pvt Ltd, known for its flagship local search platform AskMe.com, has forayed into the grocery marketplace with the acquisition of Accelity BestAtLowest Online Services Pvt Ltd, which operates through BestAtLowest.com, according to a press release.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

As part of the agreement, the e-commerce portal will become part of AskMe along with its team of 25 people, including founders Ankit Jain and Amit Nigam.

The company plans to integrate BestAtLowest.com into askmegrocery.com, a yet to launch site. Currently AskMeGrocery redirects to BestAtLowest.

BestAtLowest is operating in Delhi NCR and claims to deliver products within 4-6 hours.

"With improved comfort of online payments, we see Indian consumers choosing to shop groceries online. With 25,000 SKUs and 10,000 orders a month by July 2015, we are confident that AskMe Grocery will assume a pan-India presence by end of FY 2015-16," Manav Sethi, head - marketing and digital products at AskMe, said in the statement.

Formally launched in July 2014, AskMe is an online search platform to provide information across merchants, deals, classified and commerce. It also enables small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to be discovered and increase their business through online transactions.

Getit Infomedia (previously known as Getit Infoservices) also has another online platform called AskMeBazaar for SMEs to sell their products. AskMeBazaar manages delivery to payment collection once someone transacts on the platform.

Getit Infomedia offers services across print, online and voice media and is present in more than 35 cities in the country. The firm is supported by Malaysia's Astro (as a strategic investor) besides VC investor Helion Venture Partners. Last year, the company had acquired Infomedia Yellow Pages and AskMe from Network18 group.

Online grocery space has seen quite a bit of activity in the last few months and is becoming a fast-growing segment. Other ventures in this space include the most heavily funded venture in the business BigBasket and ZopNow, among others. Several others such as LocalBanya, Grofers, and PepperTap have also raised funding since early this year.

In a consolidation move, Godrej Nature's Basket acquired online grocer EkStop early this year to push its own hybrid speciality food retail chain.