(By Vivek & Vikas SN) Once a horizontal e-commerce marketplace, Naspers-owned online marketplace Tradus.com seems to have pivoted to become an online grocery-only store. (Hat tip - Shubhendu Sharma). Note that the company had started selling groceries by tying up with local sellers in April this year. Consumers could order groceries such as dal, rice, sugar, tea to dry fruits from local sellers through this service. It was initially available in Delhi, which seems to have rolled out to Mumbai and Bangalore in the past few months. This was after it launched a location-based marketplace in August last year, allowing users to search for products from merchants around their location. In the current avatar, the site currently offers grocery products across various categories like dairy, poultry, sweets, groceries, dry fruits and beverages among others. The company also seems to have shifted their focus from web to mobile apps, since the web store is now hidden behind a placeholder homepage which directs users to download Tradus's mobile apps across Android, iOS and Windows Phone. This makes sense considering that Tradus now aims to provide products to users based on their location,which can be more accurately detected on a mobile phone than on web. Also note that most e-commerce companies are witnessing a significant contribution in mobile-based transactions and sales, due to the rising mobile data usage in India. (Also read: The Switch to mobile). Has horizontal e-commerce segment saturated in India? Tradus has been operational in India since 2009 when it launched with a primarily business-to-consumers and consumer-to-consumer focussed e-commerce model. The company allowed users to list products…
