Big Basket is India’s first online shopping platform which revolutionised the way people bought groceries. It is easy to spot Big Basket’s vehicles and delivery agents all dressed in bright green colours. The ability to order quality vegetables and groceries and have them delivered at the doorstep was one of the main reasons why it shot to fame. Since then online grocery shopping has become commonplace with the arrival of Dunzo, Amazon, Flipkart and many other small scale businesses.
Big Basket found itself in a bit of news which it would have liked to avoid. News about a small two man bootstrapped startup named Daily Basket being sent a cease and desist order by Big Basket began doing the rounds on social media platforms. The whole issue began when Big Basket said Daily Basket was copying their app, user interface and their name. Big Basket claimed they came across a filing named Daily Basket when checking the trademark registry and felt it was a combination of the registered trademarks bigbasket and bbdaily.
The bootstrapped startup Daily Basket has no means to mount a legal battle against the six year old unicorn Big Basket. So, Ramesh Vel, one of the founders of Daily Basket, began a website named BBisabully to call out Big Basket’ bullying. The website gives a brief overview of Daily Basket which says they are an online grocery delivery platform based only in Coimbatore. The Big Basket notice contains the following points according to Daily Basket:
- Stop using the domain name dailybasket.com.
- Discontinue the mobile apps.
- Stop all the operations immediately.
- Transfer our domain name dailybasket.com (Which is premium btw, and costs a little fortune) to them immediately with free of cost.
- Pay their legal team of 2 lakh rupees to cover the legal notice.
- Do not use a similar domain containing “basket” as a prominent feature ever again.
ALSO READ: Big Basket Founding Story And Its Recipe For Success
The website BBisabully also lists out reasons and visual evidence as to why Daily Basket is completely different from Big Basket and how the former is not copying the latter. There are many brands in the market which have the word ‘basket’ in their names like Milk Basket and Nature’s Basket by Godrej. If going by the logic of Big Basket that Daily Basket copied their name, then Nature’s Basket predates Big Basket by six years meaning Nature’s Basket could unleash the same claims on Big Basket.