Bigbasket quickens slotted deliveries to within 2 hours

The slotted delivery service, now renamed to “Bigbasket supersaver”, has been rolled out in over 40 cities, including Bengaluru and Noida, and will be extended to 70 by March-end. Slotted delivery refers to a model where customers choose preferred time slots for delivery of groceries to their homes.

Hari Menon, the company’s co-founder and CEO, further said that the company may reduce slotted delivery timelines to an hour in the coming months.

The company has done away with vans and moved to bikes for deliveries, and expanded the assortment of products available in its dark stores, which are retail stores that companies use as a base for delivery of products and are not open to the public.

“We have essentially moved the service to completely a bike-based service from a delivery standpoint. Earlier we used to have bikes and vans; now we have moved it to bikes,” Menon said.

“Earlier our dark stores used to carry 8,000 to 10,000 products and the rest of the 30,000 products used to be in the warehouse. So, if your order had one item from the warehouse and one item from the dark store, the delivery would move to the next day. Now we have moved the entire 30,000 product assortment to the dark stores,” he added.

Meanwhile, customers will continue to have the option of choosing their preferred slots. For urgent needs, customers will also have the option of shopping on Bigbasket now (bbnow, in short), its instant grocery service.

India’s e-grocery market was pegged at $8 billion in gross merchandise value or GMV in 2022, according to estimates by Redseer Strategy Consultants. The market has been primarily dominated by slotted delivery, offering a convenient way for people to purchase and receive groceries online.

Menon said the move is a response to customer need for faster slotted deliveries. “This is a response to consumers who are addicted to and use our Bigbasket platforms,” he said. The move required months of “re-engineering” on the backend, he added, without incurring too much cost to the company.

Bigbasket operates three verticals—slotted deliveries of household essentials under Bigbasket, quick commerce service bbnow, and bbdaily that delivers milk, eggs and bread.

Slotted deliveries contribute to roughly 65% of the company’s annual business and offers customers an option to pick same day or next day delivery slots.

Bbnow, which was launched in 2023, delivers within an average 12 minutes.

Bigbasket operates 400 dark stores with plans to add another 50-70 stores in fiscal 2025. The company’s operations have expanded to more than 300 cities in India, recording about 15 million customer orders per month.

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Published: 21 Feb 2024, 11:05 AM IST