How We Scaled Fynd’s Delivery Coverage 40x Overnight

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe — Abraham Lincoln

We started Fynd’s operations early this year and has been servicing only Greater Mumbai Area and Pune till now. During the Festival of Fashion, we stress tested our systems, operational capabilities and gathered a lot of learnings on how to scale non-linearly efficiently. We studied several similar models namely Grofers, Zomato, Swiggy et al. to learn and ensure we didn’t do anything that was linearly scaling and operationally required a large field force. Looks like our team has now cracked the perfect overnight scaling model.

As of May 16, we support delivery across 6,091 pincode locations across the country. This switch was executed overnight but required many months of engineering to build a system that was India Scale ready.

These are fascinating times at Fynd as we look forward to serving customers in places like Budgam in Jammu, Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, Puri in Orissa, Kasargod in Kerala, Bikaner in Rajasthan, and Port Blair in Andaman!

FAST! Our Core Customer Promise

Right from the get-go we have optimised our customer experience for speed. We put in a lot of engineering effort to reduce the loading time throughout the app and designed a checkout flow which reduced the number of steps involved from 5 (industry average) to just 2. All this effort would mean nothing if our delivery times didn’t beat the industry average by a huge margin. At a time when other e-commerce players are boasting about a 4 day delivery timeline, our unique model and intelligent order fulfilment system allows us to do the same between 2–34 hours.

Fastest Delivery in the Industry

After the Festival of fashion we asked 300+ customers what they liked best about Fynd’s Shopping Experience. For a staggering 83% customers, delivery in a few hours was the single biggest reason to shop with us. We looked at our NPS data and correlated it with repeat purchases and again found out that faster the delivery, higher the customer satisfaction leading to high NPS loyal customer.

The operations team today is working with over 8 delivery partners to ensure we have the fastest deliveries in the Industry.

Delivery Time Pincode Distribution

We expect our fastest delivery to be in 2 hours and average at around 34 hours from the time of placing an order. This delivery time is only possible due to the unique brand store stockpoint model executed at scale. We will be doing deliveries from 8k+ brand stores without deploying a single person on the field. The operations across the country is managed centrally by ourNinja Team of 6 people.

One India Model: Challenges

The biggest challenge that we faced was creating a many to many relationship between stock points & delivery partners and at the same time making sure that the delivery times are not affected. To achieve this, we needed a pincode to pincode mapping across available stock points. Soon enough we realised that this is not a scalable model and we needed an intelligent model which would keep on scaling irrespective of the number of pincodes and stock points.

After multiple brainstorming sessions and talking to industry experts, we came to the following conclusions:

• Every city would have a master list of pincodes
• Serviceable pincodes would be determined by the Delivery partner
• Creating an Origin City > Destination City > Delivery Partner > Delivery Mode mapping

These proved to be the key to solving majority of the scale issues. Our total number of Delivery partners would be in between 12–15 offering the following modes:

• Hyper Local or Point to point— 2 hour delivery
• Same day — 6 hour delivery
• Next day delivery
• Two day delivery

Speed is a Culture DNA

Being FAST has always been the company’s DNA. As a lean startup, we believe our biggest strength is Speed of Execution. Anyone tracking our progress will observe that we have achieved so much in less than 250 days! We have a poster stuck in our offices reminding us of this everyday.

Two Last Things

By early June, Fynd will be available worldwide on App Store and Playstore. Also it will be available on browsers near you – both desktop and mobile. Stay tuned 🙂

With contributions from Sreeraman M G, Rajni Kant Sinha & Shwetabh Rai