Swiggy isn’t content with delivering food from restaurants, and groceries and household products through Swiggy Daily — it now wants to deliver anything at all.
Swiggy has launched Swiggy Go, which it says is a concierge service that facilitates instant pick ups and drops of packages anywhere in the city. “After enabling this with food delivery for five years and stores across the city with Swiggy Stores, Go will open the Swiggy delivery to all consumers in the city,” said Sriharsha Majety, CEO and cofounder, Swiggy. Swiggy Go will enable users to pick up and drop laundry, forgotten keys, documents and just about anything else within a city.
If that sounds familiar, it is — with the launch of Swiggy Go, Swiggy will directly take on Dunzo, which had pioneered the model of an app-based concierge in India. Dunzo had begun its operations from Bangalore, and now has operations in Gurgaon and Chennai as well. Dunzo has raised over Rs. 230 crore so far, and is backed by big-name investors including Google.
Swiggy, though, will fancy its chances in the space. For starters, it’s pretty well funded itself — it’s raised nearly Rs. 9000 crore, and is now one of India’s newest unicorn startups. Swiggy has the financial muscle to enter a new space from scratch, and hope to unseat a much-loved competitor in Dunzo. More importantly, Swiggy already runs a sprawling logistics operation — through its delivery partners, it performs food deliveries, and with Swiggy Store, it makes deliveries from supermarkets into people’s homes. By adding yet another delivery service to its arsenal through Swiggy Go, Swiggy will be able to better utilize its fleet, and hope to unlock efficiencies by having even more delivery partners on the roads.
Swiggy Go, though, will be a step up in the logistical complexity that Swiggy is thus far used to dealing with. Swiggy’s restaurant deliveries are straightforward — delivery partners take a package from a designated restaurant, and deliver it to the customer’s address. Swiggy Stores is more complex — customers upload their shopping carts on the app, and Swiggy partners must go through supermarkets and purchase the exact items that customers have ordered. There can be decision-making involved, which can mean picking the exact right variant of toothpaste, or the exact right size of the shampoo bottle. Swiggy Go is even more complex — tasks can range from fetching someone cigarettes, or finding a tailor that can fix a garment. These tasks are supported by a backend, but still require decision-making on the part of the delivery partner.
If Swiggy can get its service right — customers appear to swear by the service provided by rival Dunzo — it’ll have a good chance of cracking the space. And it will be keen to take on Dunzo anyway — Dunzo has been stepping on Swiggy’s toes over the last few months by starting a food delivery service of its own, and by entering the concierge space, Swiggy will only be returning the favour.