Less is More

India has recently had an explosion in online grocery companies trying to fill the ample gap in the market for home delivery of groceries.

Over the last few months, we have experimented with using a few of them. Mostly, ending in an unhappy experience.

It’s strange, because when we lived in New York 15 years ago, we were constant users of FreshDirect, one of the most successful online grocery providers at the time.

I was thinking about the causes of our unhappiness in using the Indian counterparts, and when I thought about it I realized that my unhappiness boiled down to features that are really irrelevant to my shopping experience, but they were offered, I took the offer at face value and then was really pissed off when they didn’t deliver (pun intended) on what they promised.

The case in point: We used Grofers. Nice app. Nice selection. But the weakest link, as you would expect, was on the fulfilment side. In the 2-3 orders that we placed, they had problems in delivering all the items that had been ordered. Certain items were out of stock, and so when the order was about to be delivered they announced that the items were not in stock. While annoying to be informed about this at the last minute, this was not our biggest gripe. The biggest issue for us was the fact that they committed to delivering quickly (often with an actual X minute estimate of delivery time) when you order from the app. But then, we noticed that by the time the order was placed, the time estimate of X minutes had increased by 20 minutes. And, by the time the order was delivered, it was X + 60-90 minutes. So, basically, they promised something in 2 hours and delivered in 4 hours.

The interesting thing is that in most cases, I didn’t really care about 120 minute delivery times. I actually couldn’t care less. I did care a little about certainty around the time that it would take for the groceries to get there. But mostly, the problem was, that Grofers offered a time of 120 minutes, and because it was a commitment they made, I held them to it. And I was really unhappy when it took double the time they had committed.

Which brings me to the broader point, which applies to my business Cians Analytics, as well. We offer our clients a base offering of research hours, and since a lot of our clients are in a different time zone, we commit to acknowledge their emails within 30 minutes regardless of time of day. I wonder if the same dynamics apply to us? It’s a feature that we provide clients. Maybe they care, maybe they don’t. It’s expensive and onerous for us to meet the commitment (with a high degree of reliability, which is key) but I think it’s worth evaluating whether it’s worth it (for the client) or not. It may be similar to the case I have described above – another feature that has downside risk for our business (risk of upsetting a client if we don’t live up to it) but not so much real value to the customer from the feature.

The broader point is: Often, as a business we have a habit of offering something to our customers thinking that it is a feature that they value. And it can be very expensive for us to deliver against that commitment. Yet, its worth stepping back and really evaluating if that feature is something the customer actually cares about. In the case above, If Grofers had only offered and focused on providing me some fixed time delivery options that were 4, 6 and 8 hours away, I would have been fine. Instead they offered a crunched time feature, then botched on the fulfilment and lost me as a customer forever.

P.S We quite like Pepper Tap now, and I use their fixed hour delivery option.