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 Richa
Maheshwari, The Economic Times
Bengaluru,
14 September 2015
 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 consumersdon't get their orders on the same day, the
order dropout rate could be as high as 50 per cent, 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 Rs 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 delivering 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 deliver 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.
(Published in The
Economic Times.)
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