Almost three years after it kicked off its services, Grofers, the online grocery delivery startup has ditched its application only strategy and has finally launched a web portal as well. The new Grofers website allows users to place their orders from the web as well.
The website’s interface is similar to that of the mobile application. It provides users with the option to purchase groceries from different categories and stores. As per the company, a team has been created to launch the website based on feedback from its user-base.
Commenting on this move, Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder at Grofers, said,
While we started the app for the smartphone user, we realised there are people who love our service but prefer to use the web instead. There were also people who do not use our service because we were app-only. We received plenty of queries around this. So, a couple of months back we assembled a team of talented engineers and designers to bring the Grofers ordering experience onto the web platform. This move should further help in driving order volumes for us.
Initially, the website will be available in 10 cities: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, and Pune. We can expect Grofers to follow up with a roll out in other regions as well, if this pilot proves to be a success.
The website has a clean interface with product pop-up details and the ability to let users add stuff by quantity and units. It is currently charging a delivery fee of Rs. 19 for orders below Rs. 500.
Grofers claims to have over 120,000 products and says that it delivers to 17 cities and regions, which include Agra, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Kanpur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, NCR, Nagpur, Pune, Surat and Vadodara.
The company says that at present, its user base is growing 4x on a month on month basis and that it has 3 million collective downloads on iOS and Android. The Grofers website should hopefully boost it further.
Market Scenario for Grofers and its cadre
The online grocery delivery segment in India hasn’t had it easy and Grofers also had its fair share of rough times. The company fired almost 10% of its work-force citing “general slowdown in activity”.
Earlier this year, it shut down services in 9 cities. On the other hand, PepperTap closed operations in February this year despite raising $51 million and pivoted to logistics; Flipkart shut down Nearby, Ola shut down Ola Cafe and Ola Food.
However, Grofers true competitor is BigBasket, which had raised around $150 million around 6 months ago. The Grofers website may let the company cater to first time or casual audiences, who would like to get a taste of the grocery delivery service before downloading its application.
