BigBasket hits 15k daily q-commerce deliveries

BENGALURU: BigBasket cofounder & CEO Hari Menon said the company has touched 15,000 deliveries a day for its quick commerce service within two weeks of its launch.

India’s biggest egrocer has been a late entrant into quick commerce, a segment that has attracted a lot of funding and players, including Swiggy’s Instamart, Reliance-backed

Dunzo

, Blinkit, Zepto and

Ola Dash

.

BigBasket’s service is categorised under two formats -- 10-20 minutes delivery, called BBNow, and 30-60 minutes delivery, called BBExpress. BBNow offers 3,500 different items, and BBExpress 8,000. The Tata-owned company has set up 90 dark stores across ten cities to provide these services.

Menon said there are three use cases in quick commerce -- top-ups, emergency buys, and impulse buys. The express delivery business, he said, constitutes around 15-20% of the overall monthly grocery basket.

Menon said there will be trouble if brands start telling people they will get anything in 10 minutes. “We must get responsible about this, otherwise it will cause a lot of trouble for bikers and the public. The express grocery business cannot be 100% of your grocery purchases. We don’t penalise delivery partners if they are late; we have taken the penalty on ourselves. Earlier, customers got 10% of the order value back. Now we have made it 5%,” he said.

The average delivery time for BBNow is about 13.5 minutes. BigBasket runs a spatial heatmap, and has strategically located dark stores so that orders can be taken and delivered on time. Menon said the company uses proprietary algorithms for demand forecasting, Google Maps, routing algorithms, and provides a buffer time to the delivery partners to reach the customers’ destination in the promised time.

The online grocery market in India, Menon said, is estimated at about Rs 22,000 crore this year, and Bigbasket has a 35% share in it. The segment is still not a winner-take-all market, he said, because of the complex supply chain dynamics, which includes high handling costs, an assortment of low-value products, different temperature controls, several fulfillment options and store formats. The complexities are even more in the quick commerce space, where grocery supply chains need to become more controlled and efficient to respond to customer demands. “It’s extremely difficult if you don’t own the end-to-end supply chain. I don’t believe you can outsource the supply chain even if you set up service level agreements,” he said.

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