Swiggy App — exploring the current product landscape
Originally published at https://gansai.blogspot.com.
Initially, my objective was to write an article about Swiggy in the lines of ‘ How does Swiggy provide value ?’, similar to my earlier article on CRED — CRED APP: How does CRED provide value ? (gansai.blogspot.com).
But, as I was writing about different technical flows within Swiggy app, I started discovering more and more — obviously, there would be lot of nuances — in terms of UX design, behavioral science, data analytics, backend architecture — which I am yet to observe and understand, which are missing in this article, hopefully I would be able to assimilate them in a future article.
As I was trying to understand different flows captured in various application, I wanted to analyze Swiggy app today.
First things first,
What is the entry point for the app ?
Did anyone notice that, you do not need to login, inorder to search for restaurants?
Most of the time, I have observed that, the first hurdle users need to cross is the sign up, in order to consume the data exposed the application,
But, in this case, the first hurdle is not there, so , the user is just pulled into the app easily.
Obviously, if the user decides to buy some food, the user needs to login.
Food for thought — or the detour into rabbit hole — follows….
Why should swiggy ask someone to login, if all the user does is: buy the food and gives the location details?
Probably, swiggy delivery person needs to contact the customer — that’s why?
Another elephant in the room is: DATA..
Swiggy needs to analyze data regionally, according to user demographics also, so that the app is customized to the user and the region, Otherwise, the app would fall behind ?
Another food for thought: How is Swiggy using the data, to customize the app ?
Follow up question : What all data is collected as raw data ?
What data is generated ?
How many gigabytes of data collected per day ?
Where is this data stored? Does Swiggy use AWS / Google Cloud / Microsoft Azure ?
What are the different data sources for Swiggy ?
It could be end-customers, restaurants, swiggy delivery partner , what else ??
What are the data insights or metrics generated ?
One answer to the above question is below:
Some insights as above are shown to customers to encourage them to order as safety measures are followed.
The question is:
How does Swiggy provide value to end-customer ?
— Fast delivery due to its strong logistics
— One thing I observe recently is: healthy hub. Many customers will be health-conscious. The app provides calorie based data, per food item.
How does Swiggy provide value to food-partners or restaurants ?
— The restaurants which are onboarded, will have access to insights as to which is the highest selling food item, accordingly, the restaurant can plan their vegetable grocery inventory. How many orders per day ? Comparative data analysis etc.
— Recently, came to know that, Swiggy has a whole new business vertical — Swiggy Packaging assist — food packaging items — this can be ordered by food partners or restaurants — so they can focus their time on making food than making packaging for packing food.
Packaging-Assist (swiggyassist.in)
How does Swiggy provide value to delivery-partners ?
— Nowadays, Swiggy has started adding ‘tip’ in the app itself, so customers could add tip for the delivery partners. This I had initially observed in Dunzo app.
How does Swiggy provide value to corporate ?
— As a corporate, companies can avail different facilities provided by Swiggy — this can be checked at: Swiggy Corporate .
— One cool thing Swiggy is doing for corporate is similar to what I had imagined earlier during corona days. Pre-corona, companies conduct get-together functions for food. But, during corona — employees are at home, in different places. So, swiggy has come up with Virtual Party — simultaneous delivery of food items to employees all over India.
How does Swiggy provide value to 3rd parties ?
— Here, I mean 3rd parties such as Credit card companies — so Swiggy could earn affiliate income, as it is bringing customers onto Credit card company platform — Swiggy shows some kind of advertisement for credit card companies.
Some of the following things could be weird observations or corollaries 😃
What is the biggest competitor to Netflix ? Sleep
What is the biggest contributor to Swiggy’s revenue ? Restaurants & Good sleep
Good sleep leads to Good health, so more people can order food.
What is the biggest competitor to Swiggy ? Restaurants , Indigestion, Aspiring home-chefs.
Indigestion makes a person to avoid food for a while, imagine the impact at scale for a while, if people stop ordering food.
Let’s assume for a moment:
1 person does not order dinner.
Approximate cost of dinner through Swiggy — 200 Rs.
So, Swiggy would lose around 200 Rs per person avoiding dinner.
Let’s assume for a moment — 5 persons across 100 food-ordering regular customers — 1000 Rs per day.
Restaurants — they are also competitors, because, if customers start visiting them, then why somebody requires a middleman — Swiggy, right ? . Then why somebody requires logistics , right?
Swiggy wants its customer to stay indoors, so that it can focus on delivering food.
Swiggy would like ecosystem of brands which would make people stay indoors, for example — NetFlix, Amazon Prime — because, when you binge-watch tv series or movies, you are glued to your cosy sofas.
Aspiring home-chefs — what if more people start cooking at home. For this, Swiggy started capitalizing on this, and started a pilot for customers to order recipe items through Swiggy.
Even now, the latest marketing campaign is: betterhalfcookbook — assuming that two people can cook food at home. They have curated items in the form of a cookbook and provided a qr code in the book. Scanning that qr code takes you instantly to InstaMart within Swiggy — thereby — allowing to order these recipe ingredients from Swiggy app itself.
If someone has to look at what enables Swiggy to run, or what keeps Swiggy ticking, we might
start asking questions like:
what keeps people glued to their homes nowadays ?
Infact Swiggy depends indirectly on brands such as:
Broadband or Data companies like: Airtel, JIO, ACT
Broadband enablers like: Cisco, Juniper Networks, Tejas Networks
Broadband entertainment providers like: NetFlix, Amazon Prime, YouTube
Entertainment enablers like: Sony TV, Mi TV etc
Companies having work from home policies. As long as employees can work from home, they would be occupied with work, for some families, cooking would not be a daily activity, so Swiggy would be the only choice.
( ofcourse these are obvious things )
Why?
- Customers can sit at home and order food from their comfort zone.
- Customers can binge-watch shows on entertainment providers.
Layered view of Swiggy business dependencies
Do you know why there is a ‘Set Delivery Location’ button shown in the app, once you have installed?
There was an instance, in the initial days, when users were not updating their delivery location and were ordering food. But, since they were present in a different location, many of these orders were getting cancelled, which affected revenue of Swiggy. This lead to keeping this button on the UI. Courtesy: Here’s Your Ultimate Guide To Using Micro-Experiences To 10X Your UX (inc42.com)
Some of the following use-case flows depicted are imaginary, so they could be probably happening like that:
As a product explorer, I was trying to catch up with Swiggy’s recent updates.
As I was writing this article, Swiggy is no more ‘Hunger saviours’, their mission statement is upgraded to ‘Convenience enablers’.
Following are some major product-feature updates as per my observations, atleast from the mobile app.
I literally felt 🤯, was trying to imagine the depth or the speed at which Swiggy is moving / growing, to grab the marketshare.
- Instamart — Grocery shopping — competing with Dunzo, Grofers, bigbasket, suprdaily etc
- Fresh Meat & SeaFood — Meat / Fish shopping — competing with Licious
- Health Hub — health-focused ordering for customers — can you imagine, you could predict the amount of calories before even you are going to consume ? I am curious, as to , how this calorie information is estimated or provided? How accurate it is, from health point of view ?
- Pet Care Stores — growing number of families in Generation Y in India are adopting pets and this lifestyle is also supported by communities.
- Swiggy Genie — pickup & drop — Anything delivered — competing with Dunzo — per kilometre — customers are charged.
As part of my product exploration about Swiggy, following are my miscellaneous learnings:
- LottieFiles — animation — json based — What is a Lottie animation? — LottieFiles — nowadays these are used by UX Designers — I also learnt that, there is a VS Code extension for working with LottieFiles. Ofcourse, the designers need to work with Adobe — designer related products to come up with animations. I am still searching..
- UrbanPiper — this is another product for the restaurants — almost every restaurant will tie up with multiple restaurant aggregator like: Swiggy, UberEats, Zomato etc. So, UrbanPiper will bring a single dashboard integrating with all the aggregators into one place and will allow for management. ( Aggregator of Aggregator 😀 )
- Income Sharing agreement — Rahul Jaimini — former CTO of Swiggy, joined pesto.tech Swiggy co-founder Rahul Jaimini quits, joins startup Pesto Tech (republicworld.com). Pesto.tech is a career accelerator for software engineers. ( The minimum compensation for pesto.tech alumni is 31 lakhs ). Revenue for pesto.tech is via Income Share Agreement — 17% of monthly income upto 3 years or 20 lakhs maximum cap. It implies that, with every alumni , Pesto.tech is guaranteed of upto 20 lakhs. Assuming 20 alumni, it could generate upto 4 crores rupees.
- Swiggy Packaging Assist — This is a whole new business vertical from Swiggy, I guess — This is a aggregator / marketplace of packaging items . The customers of this platform will be restaurants — so that, they can use them to package their food items. 🔥
- CTOTalk youtube channel — Knowledge sharing platform for CTOs and by CTOs in India — Even if you are a beginner developer or a senior developer — it is worth spending time here — atleast practical nuances can be learnt here.
- I stumbled upon a website which has content related to startups, technology, entrepreneurship — Inc42: Latest Indian Tech Startup News, Entrepreneurs & Startup Stories
- Another website which allows to understand or get a peek into what technologies are powering products — builtwith.com — swiggy.com Detailed Technology Profile (builtwith.com) — check this out -
Originally published at https://gansai.blogspot.com.
