Less than five years ago, Deepinder Goyal felt that India lacked the ecosystem to support online deliveries. Today, more than 10 lakh deliveries happen every single day across the country.
This is not to say that DG was wrong, but instead, it goes to show how quickly food deliveries have grown in the last 5 years that even the industry leaders didn’t anticipate it.
Admittedly, it’s been a roller coaster side if you look at the funding trends in food-tech. However, Quartz had a different perspective to share — at the same time that investors wrote off the sector, online ordering became more popular with restaurants and customers in India, more specifically, in the top 5 cities.
The QSR Dilemma
Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) have continued to jump on the online-ordering bandwagon. Lately, however, a lot of them feel that they are losing out a bit too much, to online ordering platforms by solely relying on those platforms for revenues.
First, it is difficult to get your restaurant discovered and selected on the online ordering platforms when it is constantly listed alongside its biggest competitors.
Besides, these platforms are designed to help customers compare options easily which means that almost every listing looks the same way. You have a limited control over your brand.
Even the customer places the order with online ordering platforms and goes back to the same platforms to place a repeat order. He or she often may not remember the name of the restaurant.
It is extremely rare to successfully build patrons out of users on online ordering platforms.
As your QSR grows beyond the first few outlets, you find yourself in a position to do something about it.
Now, it’s fairly straightforward how to build an online storefront and collect orders on your own website. But when it comes to delivering orders, you are pretty much left to hire and manage a delivery fleet on your own.
Not anymore!
Shadowfax NOW is a plug-and-play platform for QSR chains that you can use to deliver orders within 30 to 90 minutes.
For a flat fee per delivery, you get better delivery times and reliability than an in-house delivery fleet.
Here’s how.
Shadowfax solves ‘last-mile-blindness
With an in-house delivery fleet, you often have little to no visibility for your delivery fleet.
After receiving an order, you cannot accurately tell how soon you will have a delivery person available, how long he will take to the customer’s home, the route he will take to get there and definitely not where he might stop along the way.
We term this phenomenon ‘last-mile-blind’ness.
Shadowfax’s web application, on the other hand, gives you real-time location of the delivery partners.
In case of a problem with the driver or the delivery, you can simply flag an issue right inside the app. Our support team solves these queries on a real term basis.
Shadowfax predicts demand and supply better
Food delivery is unique. The orders don’t all come uniformly. Either everyone is hungry, or no one is.
There is no way for you to know if you have enough delivery boys to cater to the peak level demands or not. On the contrary, if you staff your fleet based on the peak-level demands, then you are going to end up wasting a lot of money when the staff is sitting idle at other times of the day.
At Shadowfax, we have been delivering food since 2015. We have been doing it across various Indian cities, and have served a variety of cuisines. The corresponding data gives us a unique advantage to predict the demand with much better accuracy.
Shadowfax prevents order cancellations
Domino’s came out with its 30-minute guarantee, sometime in the middle of the last decade. Since then, everyone and their mother expects a timely delivery, often under an hour.
In a 30–60 minute delivery window, every single minute counts. It’s important that there is no lag between the time the food is prepared to the time the delivery person picks it up. The delivery person further needs to find a fast route to the customer’s home and reach there in time. In case that fails, he or she needs to be able to manage the customer’s reaction.
Either you can find, hire and train a delivery person for all of that, or simply click a few buttons on Shadowfax’s web app.
Our delivery partners arrive promptly. Each delivery partner in the Shadowfax network is professionally trained for managing customer relations and continues to learn about the best practices in the app itself.
Even the Shadowfax allocation engine helps. It assigns delivery partners who know your customer’s area well. As a result, the partners are able to fill in for anything that the routing engine misses and make a timely delivery.
As a result of these direct factors, less than 1% of the 25,000+ orders we fulfill every month get cancelled. When you compare that to the industry average of 10%, you know why we consider it a state-of-the-art system 😎
If you run a QSR chain with 2+ outlets and are considering building or growing your delivery fleet, consider Shadowfax NOW.
It’ll save you a lot of time and ensure reliable deliveries at customers’ doorstep.
