SAFE DELIVERY
ABOUT THE COMPANY
As the times have never been more difficult to step out of our houses to procure basic supplies such as milk bread grocery medicines and that too in a safe, secure and sanitized way. This task is already difficult for some sections of our society like senior citizens, people with some disabilities or diseases and most of all covid-19 infected people and families.
To overcome this problem I discussed a few viable solutions with my friends and family.
And came up with an idea of providing a special delivery service.
This delivery service will provide all the basic daily needs from local marketplaces at your doorstep in a way that ensures safety of all the people involved in the process. Another important thing special about this service is easy accessibility for all the targeted groups of people.
The biggest motivation behind this startup idea is the fact I have experienced all the difficulties myself as members of my family are also covid survivors and the testing times have inspired a feeling within me that I want to help others as much as possible who are also going through the same situation.
BUSINESS MODEL AND SERVICES-
The customer can order through 3 methods — app, desktop, and by call.
For the call method we will be hiring a professional call center where the employees will be thoroughly trained to communicate with customers and help them to complete satisfaction.
Then once the customer places an order they will have an option to pay as per their convenience as we will facilitate that all the popular modes of payment are available for them.
After this the delivery executive assigned for the particular order will pick up the order from the shop will check for proper packing, then sanitize the thing thoroughly and repack in our vacuum sealed packet. The delivery executive will wear a PPE kit all the time during the process of delivery. After transporting the goods to the customers home, the executive will first sanitize the spot then place the order and step away. In case of cash the customer will take the package and place the cash in the very same spot and move away. After taking the cash the delivery executive will sanitize it and keep in a bag provided by us.
For the added comfort of our customers we will also add a feature with which they can call the shopkeeper from where they are ordering.
As we expand we will also add a provision for rush orders in which we will deliver important things like insulin injections, asthma spray,etc which need to be delivered on a priority basis.
At first we will start with less populated areas and then move on to higher populated areas.
RELEVANT PRODUCTS IN MARKET
The main products in the market are amazon, flipkart, grofers, etc which are existing e-commerce services. They are surely providing safe delivery while following all the guidelines but To order from these websites you need a good understanding of technology and online payment (as cash on delivery has been discontinued in a lot of regions by many e-commerce vendors).
We solve this issue by providing simple call to order facility
The other relevant product in the market is to call our local shops and they will send their delivery man. This way people buy from the sellers they trust but local shops don’t have proper resources to sanitize their products and deliver them safely.
We solve this issue by providing things from local shops in a safe way at a nominal fee.
MARKET DEMAND-
People who are ordering from e-commerce platforms like amazon, jio mart, grofers, flipkart, etc will continue to order from there.
But what about the 74% of indian population who do not order from these websites regularly?
They still like the old fashioned way and trust the local shops and marketplaces to buy things. But the risk of covid still exists for them and also adds to that difficulty in travelling for senior citizens and people with disabilities. Earlier local shops used to send their delivery-person but that option is not feasible anymore as local shops don’t have appropriate resources to deliver goods in a safe and secure way. Here comes our service which will deliver daily needed things from local shops and marketplaces to help uphold the trust factor of our customers and also prevents the risk of covid-19 with our safe, secure and sanitized method of delivery. Along with all these plus points we will also be helping local shops regain and revive their business which was severely affected during the pandemic.
Lastly just to point out the fact our potential consumer base is around 50–60 crore(500–600million) indian people
TARGET CUSTOMERS:
There will three main groups of people we will be targeting
1) Covid infected people — as people quarantine upon showing slightest of symptoms to protect themselves and their people around. Also the family members quarantine for a few days for precaution. So it becomes a difficult task for the family to buy basic supplies in this situation. This service will also be boon for the covid infected people living alone.
2) senior citizens : moving in and out of house has always been a difficulty for senior citizens, and since then pandemic wreaks havoc on us all,and senior citizens being the most vulnerable and highest death rate, moving out of house for them is not a good decision. Before the pandemic they would call local shops and shops would send their personal delivery man, but now this is not feasible as local shops don’t have proper resources to sanitize their products and get them delivered safely. As we all know older people are not that tech savvy, so ordering from amazon and other such e-commerce websites and apps while scrolling through all the technical difficulties is a gargantuan of a task for them. In this case our service will just be a call away. And as we all know that covid-19 virus won’t disappear soon and travelling will always be an issue for senior citizens our service will always be there for them.
3) people with disabilities and diseases : same as with senior citizens moving out for them will be difficulty and to prevent covid infection they also need their supplies in the safest way possible. Also our delivery executives will be trained in soft skills to ensure comfort and satisfaction of our customers.
MARKETING PLAN:
We will be advertising our services on different online platforms such as youtube, facebook, instagram, google searches, etc.
Along with this we will be doing some old school physical advertisement. As of now two types will be used, first we will put up posters in local shops and vendors with which we have partnered, this will ensure we directly reach people who order from that particular shop. The other physical advertisement method will be to send flyers and brochures to the homes of people in the region we will start operating.
YOUR SOLUTION
Few components in our business which will heavily rely on computational solutions involving A.I and data science.
We will be using data science models to make our expansion process more effective.
- Initially the data science model will analyze all the data related to orders delivery , location of shops, delivery time and ratio of volume of orders placed to location.
- This will help in stationing delivery executives in particular location so that workload is evenly divided among all our delivery agents. Like more delivery agents will be placed in areas where more orders are placed.
- This will help us to expand and operate our services more efficiently.
- Customer places an order
- A.I model chooses the most appropriate delivery agent taking many variables, such as delivery location, pickup location, amount of goods, direction in which the delivery agent was previously headed,etc , into consideration. This will ensure an efficient process of delivery of the products.
- Delivery agent picks up the order. Delivery agent always wears a PPe kit for the safety of all the people involved in the process.
- Sanitizes it thoroughly and places it in a vacuum sealed packet
- Safely delivers to the doorstep of the customer following all the safety guidelines.
TECHNOLOGY USED
We will use Java/Kotlin as our native language for the android app development of the same, and Swift as the native language for the development of the iOS application.
Frameworks process logic and are responsible for the business logic of the mobile app. So, here we will be using Django since it has an advantage as it has its own default admin panel. It means that a developer won’t need to install a third party library to get you an admin panel and thus making it a faster way to create an admin panel for our business.
A database stores our data from information about customers to links to all app pages, and thus we will be using MongoDB database because it will process our data extremely fast. It’s great for products that change their data dynamically thus making it really helpful for our business.
To store all our data we will need a server, and we’ll use a cloud server for the same. With a cloud server, we can easily move our data even to another country if we ever decide to scale our business or change our targeted audience. We can also expand our storage capacity in no time over a cloud server. We will be using Microsoft Azure Cloud as our cloud server and Apache HTTP server as a web server to process requests from the main server.
PRODUCT PRICING
There will be two types of pricing plans
1)pay for a single order — customer has to pay a delivery fee every time they order. This will be great for short term
2)monthly and annual subscription — this will be good in the long run for regular customers as they have to pay a subscription fee for a specified duration of time and they can make unlimited orders.
To add another stream of revenue we will use some space in our website for google adsense.
With this we will also allow local shops to advertise to our customers who are using our app or website in their respective area by showing those shops on top of search results.
This will ensure healthy cash generation.
Arrangements will be made to ensure that customers can pay through all the most popular methods like cash (sanitizing all the currency that is taken from the customer), credit/debit card, all the wallets and UPI (PAYTM, Amazon pay, mobikwik, phonepe, etc ), netbanking, NEFT transfer, Razorpay, PayPal will be accepted.
RISK ANALYSIS
The first major risk and obstacle will be outreach and awareness. Initially not many people will not know about our service as it’s new, so our marketing campaign has to be strong so that we can reach as many people as possible in a way to create a reliable brand image.
The second risk and obstacle will lie with delivery executives, their pay, and their management.
Initially we will have less delivery executives so it will be easier to manage them but as we grow more delivery agents will be required and we will have to ramp up recruitment.
The next risk will be procuring funding and being. Everyone has hit some form of financial problem in this pandemic and reduced their spendings, the case with investors are no different so seed investment will be an obstacle will require us to bootstrap in the initial phase of our startup.
The other risk will be to fend and exist and strive against the competition having more experienced management. For this we will have to give our best and give in our all, there is no other way around it.
One of the biggest risk factor will be navigation through shops in local areas, as the number of shops is quite large.
MILESTONE AND TIMELINE
Planning- this process will take around 1–2 months. This will include ground research for execution of the idea, precise budget and recruitment. Then we will have to research for our initial operations and appropriate location to start our service. Then there will research about the resources which will be affordable to us. At last finding an experienced professional in this field to work with us.
Implementing — Initially implementation will take around 1 month as we will have to holistically advertise about our brand in that area for awareness. First we will start out in a small area like single zip code (eg 110092), then we will expand this to whole of east delhi, the will start to cover other parts of delhi (eg west delhi, north delhi, central delhi, south delhi, NCR). Then we will move out to other metro cities like Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Thane,etc. Then we will start moving to smaller cities near the metro cities where we have a good foothold.
Testing- in beginning we will start out in less populated areas so that we can check and rectify problems and obstacles in our day to day operations. This will also help us easily modify and improve our AI and data science models. As expected with any startup we will encounter some bugs in our software, app, and website so we will also improve on this.
Targets — we will be able to expand our whole operation throughout Delhi NCR within 6 months, then with further investment we will be able to fast track our expansion. The ultimate target is to be operational in all the metro cities of India within 2 years.
BUDGET
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