Detergent and Soap Distribution in Nepal: Schemes, Pack Mix and Beats

Detergent and soap look like the simplest products in a kirana shop: every household buys them, every shop stocks them, and the price per unit is small. For the distributor, the trade is anything but simple. Four or five brands fight for the same shelf, each with a ladder of pack sizes, and the schemes change almost every quarter. The distributors who do well are rarely the ones with the lowest price. They are the ones who apply schemes correctly, keep the right pack sizes on the right shelves and visit every shop on the beat, every week. This guide works through those three things in turn and shows where gamitrack fits into each.

Why this trade runs on schemes

In most categories a scheme is an occasional push. In detergent and soap it is the normal state of business. A free bar with a dozen, a bucket with a big powder pack, a cash discount on a carton target, a quarterly reward for dealers who cross a slab. Shops expect them and compare them across brands.

That creates two risks. The first is leakage: schemes claimed by shops that did not qualify, applied twice, or promised verbally by a salesperson and never written down. The second is dispute: at the end of the quarter, the dealer's arithmetic and yours do not agree, and the relationship takes the hit.

Write the scheme so a clerk could calculate it

Every scheme should have exactly three parts:

1. A threshold: what has to be sold, in which SKUs, measured how (cartons, kg or amount).
2. A period: start and end dates, in Bikram Sambat if that is how your dealers think.
3. A reward: what is given at each slab, and how it is paid (free goods, credit to the ledger).

If any part needs a conversation to interpret, it will leak. "Extra support for good dealers" is not a scheme. "Dealers whose fulfilled secondary sales of 1 kg powder reach 300 cartons in Poush get a credit of X per carton" is.

A worked scheme, step by step

Suppose you run a quarterly dealer scheme on a bar soap with two slabs: a small reward per carton above 200 cartons and a larger one above 400. All numbers here are hypothetical.

Dealer	Fulfilled secondary sales in quarter	Slab reached	Result
Dealer A	450 cartons	Upper slab	Larger reward credited
Dealer B	260 cartons	Lower slab	Smaller reward credited
Dealer C	180 cartons	None	No reward, but close

Notice the basis: fulfilled secondary sales, meaning orders the dealer actually delivered to shops, not what the dealer bought from you. That single choice closes the most common loophole, where a dealer buys a truck in the last week to cross the slab and then sits on it for two months.

In gamitrack, you set the scheme once with its slabs and period. The system works out each dealer's position from fulfilled secondary orders, a manager approves, and the reward is credited to the dealer's ledger. Dealer C can be told in the second month that he is 40 cartons short, which is when that information is still useful.

The pack-size ladder

A typical brand sells the same detergent in several sizes, from small sachets to large family packs, plus bars in single and multi-packs. The margin and the sales target often favour the big packs. The shop in a village chowk, though, sells the small ones.

When salespeople push the pack that pays them best, the result is predictable: the shop's shelf is full of a size that does not move, it stops reordering, and the next visit ends with "still have stock".

Outlet type	Packs that usually move	Watch for
Village or roadside kirana	Small sachets, single bars	Being loaded with family packs
City neighbourhood store	Mid-size powder, liquid bottles	Liquid leakage, crushed cartons
Supermarket	Family packs, liquids, combo offers	Their own buying terms and returns
Wholesaler	Full cartons of fast packs	Re-selling outside your territory

The cure is to look at closing stock before suggesting an order. In gamitrack, the officer records the shop's closing stock on each visit. Over three or four visits you can see which packs drain and which sit. Order history per shop and SKU makes the pattern plain without anyone's memory.

Set up each pack size as its own SKU, with its own price list entry and weight in kg, so reports by pack are possible from day one.

The beat: a week on a soap-and-powder route

Detergent is high-frequency and low-ticket, so the beat is the engine. Here is one way to plan visit rhythm.

Outlet	Visit rhythm	What the visit is for
High-volume kirana	Weekly	Order, shelf check, scheme reminder
Regular small shop	Fortnightly	Order, pack-mix correction
Wholesaler	Weekly, with a phone check mid-week	Large order, credit follow-up
New or dormant shop	Planned reactivation visit	Trial order, first scheme

In gamitrack each beat is a route with ordered stops. The officer starts the day with GPS, and each visit is checked against the shop's geofence and recorded with a photo. A visit that is outside the geofence, unusually short or has no photo is flagged for the manager, so you review exceptions instead of every visit. Every visit ends in an order or a no-order reason.

That no-order reason is the most underused number in FMCG. If one beat's reasons are mostly "has stock", the problem is order size or pack mix, not effort. If they are "competitor scheme better", it goes to the brand manager. If they are "shop closed", the route needs cleaning up.

Through dealers or direct

Many detergent distributors book orders in shops that a dealer or sub-dealer then supplies. In gamitrack's via-dealers mode, the officer books a secondary order for the shop, the order goes to the shop's linked dealer, and the dealer sees it in the dealer app with a progress timeline and reminders. When the dealer fulfils it, it counts toward the scheme. If you supply shops yourself, direct mode skips the dealer step.

Catching dealer overstock early

Dealer stuffing is the quiet killer in this trade. A dealer buys heavily to meet a target, sells slowly, and the next primary order dries up. By the time anyone notices, the stock is old and the liquids have started to leak.

The monthly dealer stock report is the fix. The dealer counts stock at month end; gamitrack compares the count with expected closing stock (opening plus purchases minus fulfilled sales) and shows the variance.

• Count higher than expected: sell-out is slower than recorded, or sales went unrecorded. Slow the primary orders and push secondary.
• Count lower than expected: stock left without a recorded sale. Ask where it went.
• Count close to expected: the numbers can be trusted, and the dealer's target pace is real.

For batch-tracked lines such as liquids, receive stock in batches with expiry dates and dispatch the oldest first. Damaged or expired returns go through review, and once approved they come back into a branch with a credit note.

Targets, collections and commissions in one rhythm

Monthly officer targets carry a daily pace, so by the tenth of the month you can see who is behind. Dealer targets run quarterly or annually. Collections are recorded by cash, eSewa, Khalti, Fonepay, bank or cheque, allocated against the oldest invoices first, and weekly collection plans show planned against collected. Commissions on secondary orders produce a month-end draft that you finalise once the month has ended, and officers can see their earnings in the app.

Questions distributors ask

Should schemes be on primary or secondary sales? For dealer rewards, secondary (fulfilled to shops) is harder to game. Primary-based schemes reward buying, not selling.

How many SKUs should an officer carry in the order screen? All of them, but train officers to start from the shop's closing stock, not the full list.

What if a shop insists it was promised a scheme? If it is not written in the scheme set-up, it does not exist. That rule protects the salesperson as much as the company.

Related reading

Go deeper with dealer schemes that pay for themselves, retail outlet visit planning and reconciling dealer stock with secondary sales. Industry page: FMCG and packaged food.

Next step

Choose one scheme and one beat, run them in gamitrack for a full month and compare the result with your paper records. Plans and the free trial are on the pricing page, or contact us to talk it through.