On demand delivery applications initially started to creep up the market in 2014, starting with the food industry with the likes of swiggy and foodpanda. These on demand delivery applications had a huge impact on the food industry and extended to grocery & curated food deliveries within the food industry. Before that, delivery was done through individual restaurants having their own delivery guys set up.

What made these apps so popular?

The comfort of placing an order within a couple of minutes and the restaurant immediately receiving that order and preparing for it and then assigning it to a driver for delivery; The win-win situation between the customer and these restaurants were directly responsible for the success of these on demand delivery mobile apps.

But then in 2016, the market crowded with on demand delivery apps from every other startup upon realizing the potential it had. The extent of On-Demand apps spread across other industries too, which included logistics and medical. But the one negative approach by these industries was, that it all was just a matter of rushing and capturing the market rather than developing a full-fledged mobile application like Swiggy.

Talking about live tracking, FoodPanda still hasn’t implemented it since 2014; and hence the increased delivery times when compared to swiggy. Though this might seemingly be a small thing for a company to concentrate on, but the consequences are a high bet. For Eg -FoodPanda has an average delivery time of 70mins when compared to 30-35mins from Swiggy. If Live tracking were to be a part of the entire process, analytics would have clearly suggested the increased timing in delivery. Additionally this also degrades the user experience in Foodpanda. Personally, I have never used Foodpanda for this sole reason.

But why does live tracking have such high impact on user experience?

When huge cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai are taken into consideration, GPS locations transmitted to the driver handling a customer’s order are wrong often not accurate. At times the deliverer is mislead and is headed towards a wrong location and eventually loses his path. Most of the drivers from my experience are not from the host cities but instead are the workforce from around towns and villages in the same state. In such scenarios, the driver calls the user at the least a couple of times to ask for directions; and again in cities this becomes a difficult task. Live tracking plays an important role here. Why? The user can easily see the current location of the driver and guide him to the proper destination. This can save time both for the user and the driver. Even if it’s trivial, it gives a sense of satisfaction for the user because he or she knows their order is on the way and knows its current location.

What mistake is being made by upcoming startups?

Most startups negate the entire process considering it to be an expensive implementation. Additionally they come to a conclusion considering it a pain in their neck. Furthermore a bit of a misconception is developed by thinking that a separate development team and months of hard work should be dedicated in order to develop & maintain the live tracking solution. What they fail to do is consider it and look for options in implementing it.

So how should these startups tackle this?

A little bit more research on the implementation of live tracking can help them identify that there are SDKs available for live tracking too. For example Teliver which happens to be a live tracking SDK created by Quadkast Technologies takes less than an hour to implement in a mobile application and also provides free plans for their fellow budding startups. Such alternatives can be used by these startups to easily implement live tracking in their mobile application.

What is Next?

On-Demand Industry has never ceased to surprise the general growing market and will continue to do so. But the deal with Live Tracking is something of greater significance. Live Tracking as of now is only the door and the world beyond is yet to be explored. Live Tracking Analytics could be of a much diverse faction, as it will quantify the business improvement pointers. But, like said, the market we work with is always up for surprises.