Become Lazy With Delyver; Order From Neighbouring Retail Stores*

Friday June 22, 2012 , 4 min Read

Afsal Salu, Reebu Varghese and Praful Thachery were batch mates at IIM Lucknow. All three took up different paths after graduating from there. In everyday life with the long working hours and the traffic on the roads, they found that chasing multiple local vendors made it very difficult for regular shopping needs. Hence they worked upon the idea of Delyver from a professional perspective. “It was also a time in life were we started meeting up more frequently mostly at marriages of batch mates. That’s when we decided on doing “the road trip” – one where we would discuss about life, universe and everything else. In short, after an eventful seven day drive we decided to take the plunge and started in March 2010,”says Praful.

Delyver Retail Network provides customers the convenience of shopping from home. By tying up with retailers in a neighborhood across categories they provide customers a single point for their shopping needs. All products or services ordered through Delyver are delivered at the customers’ doorstep, thus freeing up time for the customer.

Delyver operates on a neighborhood model. It is essentially a “hyper local commerce”. A large portion of the regular needs of the customer are met in the immediate vicinity/neighborhood. Delyver is primarily focusing on this market and hence have tied-up with retailers in the neighborhood across categories like Restaurant Food, Cakes, Flowers, Ice Cream, Gifting, Dry Clean, Fresh Vegetables, Fresh Meat, Sweets etc. All partner products and services are listed on the website and in the offline communication to customers. Customers can hence order from any of these partners. The order is passed to the partner and the product is kept ready. The operations team of Delyver ensures delivery within 30-45 minutes.

Currently they are operational across two neighborhoods of Bangalore. Expansion plans are on and Delyver is planning to be present in 15 identified neighborhoods in very short term. As a company, they look to utilize technology at its best; GPS based delivery optimization and customer focus based on a bedrock of data analytics are two key initiatives. Ravi Manoj, an IIT-IIMB grad handles the whole technology aspect of GPS based algorithmic routing of orders, the applications for order processing, and is now focusing on the customer facing aspects of the business. They also have a strong advisory panel consisting of K Ganesh, Meena Ganesh, V.S. Sudhakar and Shankar Maruwada.

As of now they deliver Restaurant food, Cakes, Flowers, Ice Cream, Gifting, Dry Clean, Fresh Vegetables, Fresh Meat, Sweets and essential groceries. They are adding medicines and homemade products shortly and also have plans to introduce more relevant services like pest control, household repair services etc. There are plans to include instant deliveries for products like electronics, emergency supplies for household maintenance etc. They have specially designed packaging including bags or boxes to do delivery across multiple categories including cakes & ice creams. This ensures that the delicate items such as cakes do not get damaged or ice-creams do not melt during the transit. Most deliveries are done in a 30-45 minutes window. Customers can also place an order in advance and schedule a time for delivery. For some categories like cakes and flowers they also do early morning/midnight deliveries.

All products or services ordered through Delyver are given to the consumer at the price that the retailer is selling it. Delyver works on a commission basis with the retailer. In some categories the customer is charged a small amount for the delivery. They have managed to achieve a significant number of 20,000+ customers in just two areas of Bangalore and have done closer to 1 lakh deliveries since inception. “We look to move aggressively in the next few months to cover Bangalore and thereafter to other key cities. We are looking at completing a Series A fund raiser in the next 3 months,” says Praful.

Corporate customers have key client engagement managers who take care of their requirements. They are also working on consumer centric apps on Andriod/iOS platforms which will be released to the customers very soon.

Customers can place order on their website or at the customer relationship center via a toll-free number.