Among the intense competition of giving users everything within a few minutes, Grofers turned into Blinkit that promises to deliver in 10 minutes. The company recently announced their name change to ‘Blinkit’. They announced on Monday that it will operate in limited locations where 10-minute deliveries are possible. Blinkit is temporarily closing down services where they can make deliveries happen in 10 minutes.
Grofers rebranding came after Swiggy’s Instamart, Dunzo, Big Basket and Zepto are trying their best to offer essentials and groceries as fast as possible. Swiggy’s Instamart promises to deliver items in 15-20 minutes.
Albinder Dhindsa, founder and CEO of Blinkit announced the temporary shutdown of services in areas where they can’t deliver in a given time. Check out the blog post here.
“In the near term, this call will have a significant impact on our business size, and for a large number of our customers. We expect this to impact around 75,000 of the 200,000 daily customers we are serving.” Dhindsa said in the blog post.
He also added in the blog post that Blinkit is opening new stores every 4 hours and are they are looking forward to serving the customers who couldn’t avail of their services in the past 4 weeks. Users can update their location on the app to see if their location is serviceable or not.
Grofers was one of the first delivery companies that offered to deliver basic essentials to be delivered at home quickly since 2013. They rebranded Grofers to Blinkit last week.
The company’s valuation recently gained unicorn status of $1 billion (roughly Rs 7588 crore) after raising roughly $120 million (roughly Rs 910.6 crore) from online food delivery platform Zomato and their investor Tiger Global Management as a part of an ongoing raise.
Blinkit has always focused on grocery deliveries but they have more than 100 partner stores and warehouses in 8 cities. It also has 2,000 employees processing over a million orders a week across 12 cities in India.
After Grofers came into the market, their competitors came as well. Big Basket was their early competitor, offering fresh and organic vegetables to their customers. They eventually added grocery items in their app too.
These ultra-fast delivery options are on the rise making these platforms accomplish requests within seconds like an auction bid of who will reach faster than the other.
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