Gully Ki Dukaan: find what you need in the shops of your own neighbourhood

Gully Ki Dukaan is a free local shopping guide for India. Type what you need and we show which shop near you has it in stock today, so you can see it, ask the shop to hold it for a short time, and walk in. We are not an online store: we do not sell, deliver or take payment. We send customers to the neighbourhood shops that do.

What happened to our neighbourhoods

Malls and online shopping giants have taken a great deal from small shopkeepers and from customers. E-commerce giants and business giants buy at a scale no local shop can match, spend huge sums on advertising and discounts, and charge sellers commissions, fees and return costs. A small trader's margin shrinks until the shop closes.

Customers lost something too: the bargaining power that comes from knowing your shopkeeper, haggling face to face, seeing and touching the item, and getting an honest answer. Prices, choices and returns are now decided far away, by someone who has never met you.

The problem every customer knows

Today you go to the shops you already know. If they do not have what you want, you either drive from shop to shop across the city, sometimes ten shops or more, or you give up and order something online that you have never seen. Meanwhile the shop that had it was two lanes away, and nobody told you.

How Gully Ki Dukaan solves it

Type what you need. We show the nearby shops that have it today and how recently they confirmed it. The shop holds it for you for a short time. You walk in, see it, bargain, and pay the shop. One search instead of ten shops for the customer, and one more customer through the door for the shopkeeper.

How we help small businesses keep their margins

• Free for shops and customers, with no commission and no fee per sale, for now
• No discount wars: you set your own price and we never ask you to undercut anyone
• No delivery, packing or returns bill eating your profit, because the customer comes to you
• Customers arrive ready to buy, because they already know you have the item
• Simple tools: add items from a photo, import a sheet, or start from a ready list for your kind of shop
• You keep the customer: it is your shop, your relationship and your reputation

Who it is for

Customers who want to find things nearby. Shopkeepers of every size. Farmers selling at weekly markets and mandis. People who make cakes, pickles, sweets and crafts at home.

What we do, and what we do not

What we do

• Show you which nearby shops have the item in stock today, and how recently they confirmed it
• Ask the shop to hold the item for a short time when it confirms
• Guide you to the shop
• Give shops free tools to show what they have

What we do not do

• We do not sell the items: the shop sells to you
• We do not deliver anything
• We do not take payment: you pay the shop
• We do not handle returns, exchanges or warranty: the shop does, under its own rules

We do not own the supply chain. Prices and stock are given by the shops. If something is not as shown, tell us from My reservations or Help and we will look into it.

A note from the founder

I grew up in a time when everything we needed was a short walk away: the grocer who knew our names, the cloth shop, the hardware lane, the sweet shop. Somewhere along the way we started buying things we had never seen, from far away, and our own lanes grew quiet.

Gully Ki Dukaan is my attempt to change that. I want you to be able to find, in a minute, which shop near you has what you need today, go and see it, and buy it from a person you can look in the eye. I want the money you spend to stay in your neighbourhood, with the shopkeeper, the farmer and the person who makes things at home, and not only with e-commerce giants.

We are very small, we will make mistakes, and we will fix them in the open. It is free for shops and customers for now, and it will always be honest about what we do and what we do not do. If you believe in neighbourhoods, please join us and tell us how to do better.

The founder, Gully Ki Dukaan