I think the interesting thing about these start ups is how ambitious they are. The promise is always a nonsensical "You can have anything you want from anywhere you want, faster than is reasonably possible". I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger focus on the actual technical limitations of what is possible.
By making your offering "You can have anything" you draw in a load of customers who are ordering things that actually aren't that urgent, and therefore they have extreme price elasticity, whilst also making the problem you're solving the most expansive version of the problem possible. The second you start charging for the fast delivery they're just going to go elsewhere. You're just acquiring really shitty customers.
The thing to learn from is Amazon, Amazon don't make money on delivery, it was a differentiator to attract customers to their shop which makes money, and it was built on top of a difficult but possible technical problem - building a much more efficient warehouse.
In my view, there's only 1 area where people will pay a premium for time, and that's food delivery, and everything else people will settle for a longer wait (really, we're talking here 15mins vs 24 hours). The smart thing to do maybe is to find a way to utilize the non-peak hours of the food delivery companies to do grocery delivery in a less time-sensitive, but cheaper way.
By making your offering "You can have anything" you draw in a load of customers who are ordering things that actually aren't that urgent, and therefore they have extreme price elasticity, whilst also making the problem you're solving the most expansive version of the problem possible. The second you start charging for the fast delivery they're just going to go elsewhere. You're just acquiring really shitty customers.
The thing to learn from is Amazon, Amazon don't make money on delivery, it was a differentiator to attract customers to their shop which makes money, and it was built on top of a difficult but possible technical problem - building a much more efficient warehouse.
In my view, there's only 1 area where people will pay a premium for time, and that's food delivery, and everything else people will settle for a longer wait (really, we're talking here 15mins vs 24 hours). The smart thing to do maybe is to find a way to utilize the non-peak hours of the food delivery companies to do grocery delivery in a less time-sensitive, but cheaper way.