Flipkart Set to Challenge Swiggy and Zomato with Food Delivery Pilot

As competition heats up in India's fast-growing online food delivery market, Walmart-owned Flipkart will join the fray in the coming weeks. With this move, it will join forces with Zomato and Swiggy to challenge the status quo.

In an interview with a media house, Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy announced that the firm will soon debut its meal delivery service. Flipkart will launch food delivery first, as it does with all of its products, to gauge customer interest, gather feedback, and refine the offering until it finds success. Following that, the company begins to scale it.

The Launch Strategy of Flipkart

Following the model of Flipkart Minutes, the company's rapid commerce service, the launch will start small before expanding. In addition to being on Flipkart, Krishnamurthy claimed that it will be a hybrid app. Nevertheless, he chose not to divulge the branding or the city of debut. Flipkart is about to launch its food delivery services as a part of its integration with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which is supported by the government. Flipkart joins a crowded Indian meal delivery sector where other companies are testing various strategies.

The cost-effectiveness and lack of restaurant commissions are key to Rapido's business model. The company just launched its Ownly platform. In addition, instead of vying for the business of its current clients, it is concentrating on attracting millions of new users through its extensive logistics network. Earlier, in an interview with a media outlet, Chief Executive Aravind Sanka contended that the current Zomato-Swiggy model is excessively costly for both consumers and restaurants.

The company is striving to maintain menu prices that are comparable to those of offline establishments. Toing, Swiggy's comparable offering, was also created to serve budget-conscious meal delivery customers. At the same time, Zomato's parent company, Eternal, has ignored competition from up-and-coming services like Ownly and Swiggy's According to Toing, their early success is due more to sales than to a radically new selling point for consumers.

Flipkart’s Growth Strategy for Food Delivery Services

But Krishnamurthy didn't reveal Flipkart's strategy for competing; he did add that the company would only join a category if it thought it could provide consumers with a unique selling point. According to him, when a company introduces a new product, it's because it has faith in its ability to innovate and provide something fresh. He claims that there are other aspects of a customer's experience than price that contribute to value, such as selection, service, reliability, and the whole thing.

According to Krishnamurthy, Flipkart is committed to making innovations in all of these areas of value proposition. Once it thinks it has something across these, it will scale it pan-India. Additionally, Krishnamurthy mentioned that Flipkart's long-term goal is to compile an exhaustive database of restaurants. If it's integrated into the Flipkart app, users will assume that it contains the vast majority of the catalogue available. "Eventually, we will try to cover everything in the catalogue," he said.