The culture of buying things online is booming, especially in Kathmandu. Huge traffic jams, bad roads, congested parking spaces, all add to the appeal of quick online purchase, with the products delivered right at your doorsteps. From clothes to electronics and food to baby products, the online catalogue these days is vast, and at good prices too. “In this growing online marketplace we espied the need for an online liquor store and started Cheers,” says Minesh Rajbhandari, the General Manager and one of the partners of the Cheers online liquor store. A group of five professionals with diverse experiences in IT and liquor industries started Cheers in July 2016. Although it was a slow start, the store is now becoming more popular.
Cheers online liquor store is open from 10 am to 10 pm every day (365 days a year) and offers free delivery in Kathmandu on a minimum order of Rs 1,000. Cheers delivers up to six kilometers outside the Ring Road, and there is an option of online payment, cash on delivery and card on delivery. The company’s representatives come to your doorstep with portable Point-of-Sale machines and you can use your debit or credit card to make the payment. Convenient? Very. And the delivery takes place within an hour of the order’s placement. “We average 37 minutes,” Rajbhandari informs.
The website of Cheers—www.cheers. com.np—offers a wide variety of domestic and international liquors, some of which you will not find in normal liquor stores. The company lists 550-plus products ranging from different varieties of whiskey, beer, vodka, gin and wine to tobacco, mixers, soft drinks and much more. “All our products are directly sourced from importers and manufacturers who give us the best margins,” says Rajbhandari. “Not only are we taking their products to the end customers, we are also collecting data for them on the drinking pattern of people based on areas and seasons.”
Despite the challenge of low margins and high competition, Cheers’ prices are thus at par and sometimes even lower than at the regular liquor stores, and the convenience of home delivery gives them an added advantage.
Albeit with a slow start, Rajbhandari sees plenty of opportunities for business expansion, to other parts of Nepal. “Our biggest challenge is to change consumer behavior. It is still difficult to make people order liquor from their computers and smartphones. They are skeptical,” says Rajbhandari. “But on the brighter side, we have many repeat consumers. Once people order from us and get served satisfactorily, they become our regular clients.”
The ongoing World Cup season has also given a boost to Cheers’ business, Rajbhandari informs, with a 70 percent increase in sales. It is hard to bet against the sole exclusive online liquor store in the country.
