Go with Grofers for express deliveries
Based in Gurgaon, Grofers is a hyper local delivery firm, which can schedule deliveries within a 30-minute window and also fulfill orders of its merchants in off-work hours. Majority of its deliveries are in Delhi-NCR currently and it is processing over 850 orders everyday, mainly in pharma and groceries segments. Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder, Grofers talks in detail about the concept.
To take feedback from merchants in the local markets who were looking for a better logistics solution for their daily needs - whether it was connectivity from distributor to retailer or from retailer to customer; a Gurgaon-based a hyper local delivery firm – Grofers came with the concept of ‘last mile delivery’ in 2013 in the Indian logistics industry. The initial idea was to provide an on-demand pick up and drop service from neighbourhood shops for a customer. They started out with pharmacies, grocery shops and restaurants but quickly dropped restaurants as there was enough competition in the market already. Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder of the company, said, “Once we started building up the network, we realised we had the ability to go really hyper-local and open stations within a few kilometers of each other. This not only brings within minutes of every urban consumer eventually but is a much more effective network for managing both online and offline retail supply chains.” Grofers can schedule deliveries in a 30-minute window and also fulfil orders in off-work hours. Plus, its strong network fulfils its customer requests and exchanges much more swiftly. The biggest advantage is that it is seamlessly able to handle both online and offline retail so it is very well positioned for any omni-channel fulfilment. “In the local space, we haven’t seen anyone hit scale close to ours yet. We are definitely tracking a number of consumer facing players but I think the businesses are very different. We are taking a chunk of the online retail market as well, but I think eventually our network is complementary to a number of 3PL networks. This extends to taking over the absolute last mile as well as providing locations close to consumers where items can be warehoused between delivery items. Our technology and ability to be close to the end consumer enables us to provide a lot of value to our merchants,” Dhindsa shared. The company is currently present in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. It has plans to expand to Bangalore this month. In this financial year, Grofers aims to reach six cities. The biggest segments handled by the company include pharma, groceries, fashion and stationery in that order. These segments have a requirement of immediate delivery, as they are either items that are usually ordered when there is a quick requirement or items that are impulse purchases whose failure rates increase with time of fulfilment. “For pharma, we have the advantage that volume per delivery is typically lower and that enables us to leverage quick packaging and dispatch times to get to customer quickly. Additionally, the replicability of the items allows us to do fulfilment from centers close to customers instead of relying on a hub and spoke supply chain,” Dhindsa explained. Grofers has over 100 active clients in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. Majority of its deliveries are in Delhi-NCR currently and it is processing over 850 orders everyday. These orders are processed from seven stations across Delhi-NCR and one station in Mumbai. “We have built our own set of web and mobile apps to track deliveries in real time. For local deliveries, when we pick up from a merchant, the merchant and the customer get intimation that the order is picked up and an additional notification when the order is delivered. A similar tracking channel tracks any e-commerce orders we are delivering,” said Dhindsa. The biggest challenge in tracking is training and enforcement of technology utilization. However, the proximity to customers, means that the delay times in order updates, are never more than a couple of hours. Models like ‘last mile delivery’ introduced by Grofers that commit to only express deliveries will scale and force the logistics sector to adopt technology and become more consistent in meeting their customer expectations.
