BENGALURU: E-commerce major Flipkart has re-started its hyperlocal delivery services after a four year hiatus, announcing on Tuesday that it will begin now delivering a range of products such as groceries, fresh goods, dairy, meat, mobiles, electronic accessories, stationery and home accessories within 90 minutes.
The new initiative, called Flipkart Quick, will deliver more than 2,000 products in select pincodes of Bengaluru for now, but will be expanded to six other cities over the next few months. In 2015, Flipkart had announced a similar hyperlocal delivery service under which orders were delivered to customers within 60 minutes. However, it was discontinued after a while.
Now, with the re-launch, Flipkart will face stiff competition from Google-backed Dunzo, which operates across eight Indian cities and is currently serving 10 lakh orders a month. According to the company, Flipkart Quick aims to leverage the massive reach of India’s mom and pop stores , combining it technology.
Rival e-tailer Amazon’s Pantry service and Amazon Fresh also deliver orders within two hours. However, the company hasn’t tied-up with local neighbourhood stores yet. During the Coronavirus pandemic, local kirana stores have easily managed to edge out e-commerce firms in terms of supplying essentials in their vicinity.
“Hyperlocal capabilities can be described simply as building connections between locally available products and consumers in a particular area. This is a great model for India as households of all sizes are already used to their neighbourhood Kirana stores... with Flipkart Quick, we have the potential to bring together the whole network of neighbourhood Kirana stores onto our platform with just a click,” Sandeep Karwa, Vice-President, Flipkart, said. The e-commerce firm added that it will move away from the conventional pin-code system to track the location of the delivery order and instead adopt a latitude-longitude approach that will result in sharper delivery time.