·
|
Online Grocers to Speed up
Delivery to
Outrun Kiranas
Online grocers are
working on shortening their delivery time to less than
two hours by building more delivery points
or roping in more partner
stores in a bid to attract consumers who
prefer quicker kiranas to
waiting for delivery of online orders.
Companies such as
BigBasket, PepperTap, ZopNow and Localbanya say
time and convenience are driving more sales
for online groceries, unlike
deep discounting that has helped apparel or
durables segment. In fact,
if consumers don't get their orders on the
same day, the order dropout
rate could be as high as 50%, industry
experts said.
“In general ecommerce
segment, the price differentiation is so high that
the consumers are ready
to wait as they won't get such an option outside.
But in our case, if we don't deliver it when
consumers need, they will
go to the next kirana store even if there is
` . 20 discount on our site,“
said Mukesh Singh,
cofounder of ZopNow.
Getting daily household,
food and personal care products delivered at
short notice needs investments and
partnerships with a host of players.
ZopNow, which is present
in five cities, is in talks with various supermarkets
chains for tieups to shorten its delivery
time while Amazon India, which
started Amazon Kirana services in March,
plans to rope in more kiranas
to reduce its delivery
time to 2-4 hours.
BigBasket, which
recently acquired Bengaluru-based hyper local delivery
startup Delyver, introduced one-hour
delivery service in Gurgaon last week.
“There is a part of the
basket that the customer buys on a higher frequency
basis. These are smaller order values and
these can be delivered
efficiently through Express delivery,“ said
Vipul Parekh, chief finance
officer at bigbasket.com.
Gurgaon-based PepperTap,
which offers two hour delivery service,
plans to reduce the time
to one hour by next year. “We are working
on a technology which
will help us crunch the whole process, from
picking up to deliv
ering the product,“ said Navneet Singh, CEO at PepperTap
that currently operates in seven cities
Mumbai-based Localbanya,
which offers deliveries
on the basis of time slots, also introduced two to
three-hour delivery service in five cities
two months ago. However, it does
not plan to crunch the time any further.“The
issue is that most of this is
done on a bike and hence, there is a limit
to how much a biker can take
along and how much orders we can accept for
a particular time. Hence,
we will not reduce the time any further for
now,“ said Karan Gonsalves,
head of marketing at Localbanya, which is
present in six cities.
Despite these companies'
efforts to reduce delivery time, some experts
say replacing local grocers still remains a
huge challenge for online
grocers.“Over the years, grocers have built
a relationship with their
customers. All you have
to do is call them up and they will deliv er
the products to you in 30-35 minutes,“ said
Devanghsu Dutta,
CEO at Third Eyesight.
That kind of service would be hard for any
online grocer to match.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment