Pet food delivery

[elanpro43]

@davemalyon I wouldn't store these myself. Just buy it right up and deliver when an order comes. This way I'd save the warehouse and supply chain costs.
Pet grooming and dog walking isn't really big in India. It could become one day, and I could roll it out with in my website.

 

[markgraybill]

@elanpro43 I’m from India as well and we get our pet food delivered by the store we usually buy from. A lot of the local pet food stores deliver directly, they don’t charge anything and they give a min discount of about 10% - provided your bill is above a certain amount. These are the guys you need to beat. Our usual store sometimes runs out of stock and then we go to the fallback store. Will you be able to do that as well?

The idea is to ensure that what you make as your commission doesn’t erode with the other cost of doing business. Also remember that pet food is heavy and couriers usually charge by weight which is why cat litter is expensive to buy online.

Bottom line: there has to be a compelling case to get it delivered from you.

 

[elanpro43]

@markgraybill The stores in my city don't do delivery. Atleast most of them don't. I live in Pune. I intend to apply this model to my city first. If I am able to get even 10% of the households use my service, I'd be able to breakeven. Think of it as Diapers.com for pet food. Unless there's a giant ecommerce corporation trying to undercut your profits, I guess this model would work. If it works, I'd want to apply it to other cities and other similar products in my city.

 

[markgraybill]

@elanpro43 I’m from Pune as well and the there are three stores in a 3km radius and all of them deliver. I guess that’s another inconsistency to deal with.

 

[elanpro43]

@markgraybill Well, you are out my target audience I guess. I'd still want to test this out with atleast one delivery boy for a period of 3 months and see how it goes.

 

[markgraybill]

@elanpro43 Good luck and do let us know how it goes.

 

[goldhorde]

@elanpro43 I work at chewy and it is giving Amazon a tough competition in USA. Their business model is mostly focused on two day shipping and subscriptions. While Amazon also provide subscriptions and two day shipping, the difference is in the customer service provided by chewy. Chewy is more than just pet food Delivery and they are now into pharmacy as well.

 

[elanpro43]

@goldhorde Thanks for the quality feedback.
I have questions for you:

How do prices differ between chewy and Amazon?

Do you think the model in post is viable?

 

[613jono]

@elanpro43 Being Indian my question to you is, how many people actually buy pet food. I have not really seen anyone buy pet food, people around me tend to feed it normal people food. I am not sure how big pet food is in India. I saw pet food stocked in my local super market for some time and then it disappeared so I can only assume people did not really buy it. So you might want to do some market research and actually see how many people feed their pets pet food.

 

[elanpro43]

@613jono A lot of my friends and family feed the dog/cat with pet food. Well bred dogs costs from INR 5K to 25k. People tend to care for their grooming and diet very much. I agree a lot of the people feed their cat with human food.

 

[elanpro43]

@613jono A lot of my friends and family feed the dog/cat with pet food. Well bred dogs costs from INR 5K to 25k. People tend to care for their grooming and diet very much. I agree a lot of the people feed their cat with human food.

 

[reluctantasr]

@elanpro43 IMO if you're passionate about it just clone chewy.com and get big enough for them to buy you out.

 

[elanpro43]

@reluctantasr chewy is not present in India and I do not know if they'd be looking to enter. I am interested in basing my model on my city first and then scale. I do not know if a player would want to buy a one city business. I am keen on bootstrapping it.

 

[jrmacool]

@elanpro43 I mention merely out of interest, here in the Middle East where I live, every single pet store in my city offers free same day delivery. It is a competitive business. From what I can tell, it is sometimes the store owner who handles the delivery in the early evening when he closes the store, or it is an independent delivery guy with a bike who handles deliveries for a few stores.

Because it's assumed the customer and store are in the same neighborhood or close enough, the travel costs are very low.

This means that this is testable. Talk to a few pet stores within a neighborhood and see if you can do deliveries for their customers for a month. It will highlight whether it is feasible or not. The good news is that once a customer expects free delivery, everyone will have to offer it.

Also, worth noting, I sometimes order pet supplies from a store outside my city. Now, when they know they have a delivery in my neighborhood, they call me to see if I need anything.

 

[613jono]

@elanpro43 You don't do stats like that

 

[613jono]

@elanpro43 I have 2 points of advice to give and they are just an amateur opinion, so please do not take it harshly.

1) You will not ever capture 100% of the 400,000 residents you are talking about. I am assuming you know this though, because from your post, you seem pretty knowledgable. You should try to aim for like 10-20% of those houses in the beginning and scale onwards. Don't worry about the 26 delivery boys needed or anything like that. You haven't started the business and are already thinking about the million dollar stage of the business. When the time comes for you to grow and hire more employees, it will be a good problem and you'll know what to do by that point. You won't even need to ask anyone else what to do because you'll have that figured out on your own, i guarantee it.

2) 6% discount? You can do better than that! You are potentially bringing tons of business to another retail business, who probably marks up their items by 2-5x their cost! Ask for a 50% discount and haggle your way from their. You can get 25% off very very easily. Even regular customers get coupons for better deals on 1 bag of dog food. You're potentially buying hundreds of bags from this store a month and should demand a very large discount, otherwise you'll go direct to the wholesalers (another viable option for you btw).

I'm sure you've probably thought about both of those points though and I'm not trying to say you haven't looked into it. Just my friendly advice though Good luck!

 

[elanpro43]

@613jono Hello, thank you for taking time to provide your feedback. My comments:

1. Yes, I am only targeting 10% market of my city, that would be 40k households. The numbers in my post were posted only because someone in the comments said that they won't ever add up. This is why I tried to provide some rough calculations that this model would work. I would initially deliver all the orders myself until I gain some traction. Then I'd hire a deliver guy when I start getting atleast an order a day and focus on marketing. The other delivery guys will come later as the demand increases.
2. This is what a local store provides me. Initially I'd only get this and not more. I could negotiate, but the best it would go up is to 8-9%. When I scale to atleast 15-20 orders a week, that is when I can ask for more. When I get to 20 orders a day, that is when I could apply for a distributors license.

 

[613jono]

@elanpro43 Great to hear! You got this! Not sure what the laws in India are like but you can buy from wholesalers with a simple business license, which is less costly than a wholesale license

 

[helpforacause]

@elanpro43 Chewy.com has this market dominated.

Good luck.

 

[elanpro43]

@helpforacause I am from India. We only got Amazon to beat.