Taking another step towards setting the gold standard in on-demand logistics space, Shadowfax has become the first company in India to guarantee a delivery within 4 hours of receiving an order in select cities. Gone are the days when a customer was willing to wait for days for a delivery to happen. Now she demands instant gratification — just like she would receive from the store next door.
This is the prime reason why online players like Xiaomi, Myntra, First Cry, Urban Ladder, Lenskart, and Zivame want an offline presence as well. On the other hand, brick-and-mortar brands such as Shoppers Stop, Pantaloons, Soch, and Abof set up online shops to deliver from outlets. In India, O2O (online-to-offline i.e. Order is initiated online but fulfilled through an offline store) is estimated to be a $64 billion opportunity in India.
At Shadowfax, our aim has always been to provide delightful customer experiences. Stepping into O2O space, we don’t just enable superfast delivery for customers but also help various small merchants compete with retail giants. To make this happen we have partnered with multiple marketplace operators like PayTM, BigBasket Specialty and 1mg.
These platforms have an extensive network of merchants who operate in the online marketplace. Shadowfax partners with these platforms to enable delivery in the real world. While similar models have been successful in cities across China, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, Shadowfax adapting the model for the idiosyncratic challenges marketplace platforms face in the Indian marketplace.
“We have created a unique hybrid of hyper-local delivery to run in conjecture with the more traditional scheduled delivery model used by e-commerce players. O2O has been a very unique where we have extended our API to various marketplace operators allowing us to identify in real-time if an order can be delivered within 4-hours. We base this not just on rider availability and store location, but also a prediction of traffic situation using our proprietary machine learning algorithms,” said Sarthak Patnaik, Director Operations — Process Design at Shadowfax.
“If the delivery is possible within the next 4 hours, Shadowfax maps the route for the rider to chain deliveries in the most optimal manner. If not, the rider picks up items at end of the day as part of our e-commerce operations and delivers it the next day using our API integration we also push the real-time order status to our O2O clients which can be used for Order Tracking at their end,” says Varun Jain, Senior Software Developer at Shadowfax.
Piloting this model with PayTM, we were able to get from idea to execution and launch in record time. We have developed successful variants of the model for grocery and medicine segments as well. Now we are ready to partner with other O2O platforms and extend this service to a much wider range of customers. With a promise of instant gratification even in the e-commerce space, we are extremely proud to usher in a new era of commerce and fulfilment for our partners.
About Shadowfax:
Shadowfax is India’s largest crowdsourced delivery platform with presence in 13 cities across India and 5000+ daily active delivery personnel. Shadowfax’s unique app enables delivery of food, grocery, pharmacy and e-commerce for businesses and helps them create customer delight using technology. With relentless focus on engineering pleasant experiences for the customers, Shadowfax envisions to become the most desirable and trustworthy delivery platform for customers.
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