I'm familiar with the Instacart model in the US, where they do shopping and delivery but do not have any warehouses. Did you consider this model? Why did you decide to own the warehouses as well?
1. Inventory management is very poor in the retail stores around Dhaka. Most (95%) of them are very small (carrying ~500 SKUs), and even the larger ones have difficulty in ensuring supply of all products. We found that people would get annoyed if we couldn't send them all the products they asked for (98% fulfillment rate was not good enough).
2. The prices don't work if you are a layer on top of the existing infrastructure. People are a lot more price sensitive -- in fact, irrationally so. They care about getting a "bargain" rather than the mathematical value of the bargain. SO we couldn't survive by taking a mark up on products like instacart.
3. Part-time work is non existent and we couldn't trust the quality of the workforce in an on demand model. We have to train people to understand the difference between mayonnaise and mustard.
4. Some Indian startups have gotten around the idea of on-demand workforce by just hiring all their deliverymen full-time. Their unit economics should be pretty tough.
5. The warehouses are optimized for picking and dispatch. Real Estate prices are expensive. We should be seeing much better revenue per square feet than regular grocery stores.
1. Inventory management is very poor in the retail stores around Dhaka. Most (95%) of them are very small (carrying ~500 SKUs), and even the larger ones have difficulty in ensuring supply of all products. We found that people would get annoyed if we couldn't send them all the products they asked for (98% fulfillment rate was not good enough).
2. The prices don't work if you are a layer on top of the existing infrastructure. People are a lot more price sensitive -- in fact, irrationally so. They care about getting a "bargain" rather than the mathematical value of the bargain. SO we couldn't survive by taking a mark up on products like instacart.
3. Part-time work is non existent and we couldn't trust the quality of the workforce in an on demand model. We have to train people to understand the difference between mayonnaise and mustard.
4. Some Indian startups have gotten around the idea of on-demand workforce by just hiring all their deliverymen full-time. Their unit economics should be pretty tough.
5. The warehouses are optimized for picking and dispatch. Real Estate prices are expensive. We should be seeing much better revenue per square feet than regular grocery stores.