Blinkit has quickly risen to prominence as one of the country’s leading grocery delivery startups. How did they manage it? Through perseverance, determination, and a commitment to customer satisfaction. Grofers, one of India’s leading eCommerce companies, gave birth to Blinkit.
When Grofers decided to discontinue their grocery delivery service, a group of employees decided to start their own business, and Blinkit was born!
Blinkit (formerly Grofers) is India’s leading online grocery delivery service. The company was established in 2013 and is based in Gurgaon, Haryana. Let us understand in detail the success story of Blinkit
What is Blinkit?
Blinkit was founded in December 2013 by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa as an eCommerce company that delivers goods to people’s homes. Blinkit, based in Gurugram, has completely transformed the retail experience.
In a nutshell, Blinkit is an e-commerce marketplace that makes daily shopping easier than ever. It allows customers to shop at their favorite stores in their neighborhood and receive quick delivery. People can buy groceries, fruits and vegetables, bakery items, flowers, meats, pet care, baby care, and cosmetics with just a few taps.
Blinkit is one of India’s most popular grocery delivery platforms. To date, it has received over $1 billion in funding from various investors. Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa founded the company in 2013. Blinkit is one of India’s few Unicron companies, with a $1.01 billion valuation.
Blinkit (formerly known as Grofers) is a leading grocery delivery platform founded in India in 2013. The company was previously known as Grofers, and its name was changed to Blinkit on December 13, 2021, following its rebranding. Blinkit is currently India’s third-largest grocery delivery service provider.
After BigBasket and Amazon, it accounts for approximately 14% of the total market share. The company currently operates in over 28 Indian cities and delivers orders to customers within 10 minutes. So let us get into this article and read about this amazing company’s success story.
Blinkit operates on a marketplace model. It has no personal warehouses or grocery stores. Instead, the company collaborates with various local grocery stores and merchants in the city, and the delivery boys go there to pick up the ordered items. The orders are then delivered to the customers by the delivery boys.
Blinkit accepts orders via its app or website, and its tie-up system enables them to reach local grocery stores and deliver orders to customers within 10 minutes. Blinkit profits from these orders because they charge a commission on each order.
How does Blinkit work?
Blinkit has rebranded itself and now offers its users delivery within 10 minutes. Blinkit, which serves 28 cities in India, ensures that orders are delivered within 10 minutes of being placed online.
People reacted negatively to this change in services, believing that Blinkit used its delivery personnel to fulfill its promise to the masses. Albinder Dhindsa explained how Blinkit planned the delivery task in less than 10 minutes. Blinkit has partner stores within 2 kilometers of its customers. It also has more than 60 partners in Delhi and three partners in Gurgaon.
Blinkit operates on a commission-based revenue model. It has partnered with a variety of merchants and local shop owners to provide grocery delivery in the surrounding areas. On these orders, Blinkit charges a percentage of the merchant’s commission. These range from 8% to 15% for orders up to INR 700 and 12% to 15% for orders up to INR 1000. Customers are also charged a delivery fee if their order value is less than INR 250.
In contrast, it has a sufficient number of partner stores in other cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and so on. These stores are an important part of their business because they help them deliver groceries and other necessities to their customers. These partner stores are densely equipped and strategically located, allowing Blinkit to deliver 90% of received orders within 15 minutes.
Furthermore, Blinkit boasts efficient in-store planning and management, as well as advanced technologies that allow orders to be packed within 3 minutes of being placed. People were worried about the safety of the delivery guys. Blinkit responded by stating that delivery drivers are not incentivized to be quick and deliver by jumping the lights.
Furthermore, Blinkit reported no incidents involving their delivery drivers, confirming that drivers are not overworked. Albinder Dhindsa discussed the rebranding and stated that 10-minute delivery is not a goal. Still, a need as life becomes more fast-paced and hectic, creating a global demand for fast on-demand grocery services.
Blinkit and its Design System:
Things move faster than the Flash at Blinkit (formerly Grofers). With multiple teams and parallel development cycles, designers struggle to stay aligned and consistent with our limited resource library. We used to rely heavily on internal UI kits and Sketch libraries that were not updated or maintained regularly. As a result, we inherited a lot of design debt and platform disparity.
We began looking for a more comprehensive solution to assist us in creating consistent and meaningful experiences at scale and speed. To keep up with the pace of our business, we need a system that allows us to be more flexible and agile in our design process. What we hope to accomplish with this system is to:
Blinkits Design System
Be consistent and cohesive across platforms:
Blinkit audited its designs across the board, listed the inconsistencies, and determined that the majority of them were present due to a lack of a unified design philosophy. It requires a well-maintained design system with reusable components that reduces friction and allows any designer to quickly put together a screen without worrying about violating our design principles.
Increase your speed:
With the help of a few reusable components, blinkit hopes to define all components, flows, and patterns within its apps and website. It will expedite our design and development process while also improving communication and collaboration throughout the organization.
Improve user experience:
Since different designs are misaligned, it has had difficulty maintaining feature parity across platforms and providing a consistent experience. Blinkit unintentionally introduced a lot of cognitive load and frustration for their users.
Blinkit, also known as the Hyper-Local on-demand logistics system, operates on a marketplace business model. It aims to reduce the need for customers to visit local stores to buy consumer goods in favor of ordering online. This startup does not own any supermarkets or warehouses.
It simply collaborates with the city’s local grocery stores before dispatching its delivery personnel to pick up the groceries purchased by customers from these retailers. They accept orders via their mobile app or website. Because the firm charges a fee, this tie-up strategy helps local grocery store owners acquire more orders while also allowing Grofers to benefit from these transactions.
Revenue Model of Blinkit:
Blinkit has had a lot of success with investors and financing. Grofers has so far raised approximately $1 billion in funding. On March 11, 2022, Zomato led the most recent financing round, investing $100 million in Blinkit. The $100 million fundraise is also the first tranche of a $400 million investment round, with additional funds expected to arrive within the next week, according to the rapid commerce startup. Instead, the food tech behemoth offered a $150 million loan.
The online grocery delivery company was certified on August 16, 2021, after receiving $100 million from Zomato, an Indian food delivery juggernaut. This helped the online grocery delivery company reach a valuation of more than $1 billion and become a unicorn.
The business model of Blinkit is similar to the commission-based income model. Blinkit has collaborated with local business owners and merchants to provide groceries and daily necessities in the surrounding communities. Blinkit charges these merchants a commission on these orders. The commission ranges from 8% to 15% for orders less than 700, and from 12% to 15% for orders less than 1000. If the order is less than INR 250, Blinkit will also charge a delivery fee.
Blinkit currently fulfills 1.25 lakh orders per day. Blinkit believed it could be a fast commerce company that delivered everything people needed daily, and as of December 13, 2021, the company reported processing 1 million+ orders per week across 12 cities in India.
Blinkit is already one of India’s largest e-grocery companies, with over 5,000 products available for home delivery in as little as 10 minutes, and has seen significant growth along the way.
Blinkit received a $150 million loan from Zomato on March 16. According to TechCrunch, the two had negotiated an all-stock merger agreement at the time. As a result, Zomato would pay around $700 million for the latter.
Since switching to rapid delivery last August, Blinkit has shrunk and is struggling financially. It has lost its unicorn status as a result of this transaction, raising questions about the viability of such a business strategy.
The new business model has greatly aided Blinkit in providing excellent delivery service to end-users. Blinkit has achieved excellence through the effective use of technology, the presence of partners, suppliers, and alliance partners, and the provision of thousands of items such as bakery products, meats, and flower delivery.
Blinkit’s revenue model is similar to the commission-based revenue model. It has formed alliances with local shop owners and merchants to provide grocery and daily necessities in the surrounding areas. Blinkit warehouses its products and uses its infrastructure to deliver them to end users. Every order placed through the website is subject to an eight to fifteen percent fee. Blinkit has also invested in its original labels.
In Conclusion, Blinkit is an app that assists the company in accepting orders and delivering them on time. Blinkit (formerly known as Grofers) continues to thrive as a result of its evolving business model. Blinkit’s app allows you to increase revenue by exposing your company to a large number of people. Nowadays, everyone prefers to shop online.
Remember that not just any app, but a cleverly and diligently developed app, can help your business gain the desired traction and solidify its position in the marketplace. As a result, hiring professionals to develop your apps is critical. Contact AppsRhino today if you want an app like Blinkit’s. We have experience developing such on-demand apps and have always met or exceeded our client’s expectations.