Flipkart expands grocery delivery services in Bengaluru
eCommerce giant Flipkart’s hyper-local grocery delivery services app ‘Nearby’ is planning to expand its services across the city of Bengaluru. 'Nearby', will add more locations as the company attempts to taken on grocery e-commerce sites such as Grofers, BigBasket, LocalBanya and PepperTap. Flipkart launched the pilot early last month with seven locations, but has since grown to 30 neighbourhoods.
Customers can order groceries, personal care products, health and wellness products, baby care products, and household supplies any time between 10 am and 8 pm. Flipkart also offers free shipping on every order for a limited period.
The growth in the space suggests that Indian consumers, many of whom are strapped by factors such as time and distance from brick-and-mortar stores, are not only going beyond white goods and fashion to small ticket FMCG items through smartphones.
As a consequence, the so-called 'hyperlocal' grocery delivery space is increasingly looking attractive to large e-commerce and technology-based service providers; taxi aggregator Ola has its own Ola Store application, while digital payments provider Paytm briefly launched a beat-version of a similar service on Google's Play Store.
As the logistics and delivery backend in large cities across India matures, more players are looking at solving the hyperlocal logistics problem, which are typically harder to crack.
