How is bigbasket managing the surge in demand during COVID-19 crisis?
Initiatives by Product, Engineering, Marketing, HR, Supply Chain Management & Operations
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” — Vladimir Lenin
Online grocery is seeing an unprecedented demand due to the lockdown. So as a Product Manager at bigbasket (India’s largest online grocery supermarket), I would love to share our story since lockdown — Serving 30,000 customers on March 23 to whooping 3,00,000 customers by end of April 2020.
What happened to bigbasket during the lockdown?
3–6x surge in demand
Just when the lockdown was announced, the Google Trends data shows a spike in the popularity of terms — online grocery and our brand name. This means a lot of people started relying on online grocery services to get essentials rather than visiting a nearby store. This surge in traffic choked our backend services which caused our site, app to slow down.
Large number of orders cancelled
After the announcement of lockdown, it was clear that the government had made exemptions for essential services including grocery, kiranas and e-grocers. But there was a lot of confusion in the first week among the on-ground authorities on what comprised essential services. We faced disruptions in many cities as police were not fully aware of the exemptions announced by state governments for grocery deliveries and had stopped some of our delivery staff, warehouses from operating. This, unfortunately resulted in us cancelling a good number of orders.
Biggest complaint — No slots :(
Interestingly our major challenge was not the availability of stock, but it availability of the delivery slot. The main problem was a large section of the workforce had left for their villages. This meant we couldn’t pick orders and deliver orders in sufficient numbers to satisfy the 3–6x increase in demand. Resulting in slots closing within a few minutes of opening.
So what did we do?
Product, Engineering Initiatives
Immediate measures — Initial 2–3 days
Blocked traffic from first time visitors
Only existing customers were able to access the site, which meant that first time visitors who were trying to access the site saw a site down maintenance page. This was a big call because though we wanted to serve everyone, we had to prioritize, giving more importance to existing customers. This was essential to ensure stability of our database & servers, during the influx of traffic.
Blocked traffic from non-operational cities
Local government authorities had stopped some of our delivery staff from operating, so there was no point allowing traffic from such cities (E.g. Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune) and we could instead use that server resource to do something meaningful.
Database upgrade to handle ~50% more load.
This was done overnight by our engineers. Post which we started allowing traffic from all the cities & also allowed new visitors to access site and place order
Need of the hour — New features
Contactless Delivery
We immediately disabled cash / card on delivery option in the payments page.
Educated about contactless delivery in the transactional messages — ‘Please ensure the order is prepaid and keep a bag outside for a no contact & hassle free delivery’. This was communicated in messages sent to the customer when the order is placed, and again when the order is out for delivery.
Bulk order cancellations — No more!
First of all, it was difficult for customers to get a slot and place order. On top of it, we ended up cancelling a good number of orders in few cities, because of the restrictions imposed by the local government authorities. Once the order was cancelled, we refunded the money into bbwallet. There was so much angst because Rs 2000-3000 was lying in the bbwallet and customers don’t even know when they would find a slot again. All of this created a lot of frustration among customers. Therefore we quickly took 2 actions:
- Bulk refunds to source — We worked closely with our payment gateway partners and developed ways to do bulk upload of refunds, which reduced lot of customer complaints.
- Bulk slot change — Customers expressed that it was okay to delay the orders by a few days, but not cancellations. So, we quickly built bulk upload feature to move the slot of orders to a later date.
Optimizing Cron
So what is a cron? In simple words, it’s a queue to process some information. Let’s say we have a queue to mark orders as processed and packed. This queue was getting killed because of heavy load on servers. So a simple engineering hack was done — Break that one queue into two queues. One queue to process order ID with odd numbers, another queue for order ID with even numbers. So you could possibly use these hacks when your cron is getting killed.
Marketing Initiatives
Visibility of customers serviced per day, the ramp-up
We were flooded with complaints about slot unavailability. In fact there were few good internet trolls by customers “A lightning struck in between dark clouds and I got a slot on bigbasket; Getting bigbasket slot is now like getting ticket on Tatkal”. So we wanted to tell our customers that we are ramping up quickly, from where we started. Hence we started showing ‘Order Update’ with the number of customers serviced every day.
Extending bbstar membership
Firstly, what is bbstar membership? It’s a loyalty program which offers free delivery if order value is above Rs 600 and access to priority slots. That is bbstar members get early slots compared to non bbstar members. However because of slot unavailability issues, even bbstar members couldn’t benefit much from the membership. So as a token of gratitude, we extended the membership by a month, for free.
Marketing Communication
Customer Service team was getting a lot of queries on “When would you deliver in my area?”. So marketing team started communicating about where we are not operating and why. These operational updates were rigorously communicated on Facebook, Twitter, On-site banners which answered customer’s queries.
Also, the support from social media became a boon. There were many tweets by customers across the nation, asking MP of the region / city to allow bigbasket to function. They mentioned that they are relying on bigbasket for groceries and essentials. All of these really helped.
I want to quote an inspiring story here — When our delivery executives wanted to come back and work, we sent buses to pick them up. A police commissioner sent a cop and a van with us to ensure we are not blocked. So we did get a lot of support from local police after the first week.
Apart from that, timely marketing communication also diverted few customers from bigbasket to bbdaily, which helped in freeing up some slots on bigbasket. bbdaily is a subscription app where we deliver milk & some essential products to apartments between 5 AM to 7 AM.
So we requested our customers to check, if their apartment is in the list of featured apartments, to order from bbdaily. This would free up slots for bigbasket customers who live in individual homes. This marketing move has definitely worked for us because we are seeing a good increase in bbdaily orders.
Supply Chain, Operations Initiatives
Product, Engineering, Marketing did what best we could working from home. But now let’s talk about real rockstars — The people in supply chain management who pick, pack items and the operations team who would deliver these orders to customers.
Focusing only on essential products
Major initiative of supply chain team was to focus only on daily essentials like rice, atta, staples, vegetables & hygiene products. This reduced assortment helped in 2 ways —
- Increasing the picking efficiencies
- Focusing intensely on replenishment of these products, to ensure these are not out of stock.
Apartment Delivery Service
Major initiative of operations team was to deliver orders in bulk to apartments. So just to give you an idea of how this works -
- A volunteer from your apartment, say ‘Kishore’ will register on bigbasket. Kishore will be the point of contact for us.
- We will share an excel sheet which contains the list of items that can be delivered.
- Then Kishore will check with all the flats who want to avail the service and quantities to be ordered for each item.
- He will share the filled sheet with us. We will place an order through backend. Once Kishore pays for the whole order, we will deliver the order to the apartment the next day.
Currently, bbdaily is serving thousands of orders using this model. At bigbasket, we are piloting this in a few cities. We will soon scale up with delivering orders in bulk to apartments.
So what role did PMs & Engineers play here? PM needs to come up with what are the necessary columns in that excel sheet required to place an order. Engineers built the feature of order placement through backend.
HR, Projects Initiatives
New safety policies in the warehouse
Among all other things, ensuring safety of ground staff is of the utmost importance to us. Sanitizing warehouses, delivery vans frequently, thermal scanning of employees, ensuring only those without any symptoms are allowed to work.
Tie up with Uber, Rapido
We did tie ups with Uber, Rapido to ensure more manpower. Our HR team is busy hiring ~10k people for warehouse operations and delivery. Also, quickly training the new folks on using the delivery app and processes.
What else changed in other teams?
Content Team — Manually updating products under ‘Essentials’ list
You would see a big banner on the home page saying ‘Essentials’ since lockdown. So this product list was updated 2–3 times a day by content team, after checking stock reports. This was to make the customer shopping experience easier and quicker.
Customer Service — Enabling Work From Home
Who do you reach out to if you need any help from a company? Well yes, you are right it’s the Customer Service (CS), the forefront warriors. It took a huge effort by the CS team to enable work from home, ordering hundreds of laptops for our CS agents.
Ads — Temporarily paused
In the above graph, you can see a spike in traffic on March 23 (when lockdown was announced). This combines Organic + Direct traffic. Let me take a minute to explain what this is.
Organic traffic — People who searched for ‘bigbasket’, ‘online grocery’, ‘buy vegetables’ etc in Google, clicked on the bigbasket link and landed on our site.
Direct traffic — People downloaded the app from play store / app store, people who came to site directly by typing ‘bigbasket.com’ in the web browser.
Since this traffic resulted in a 3–6x surge in demand, we temporarily paused all advertisements.
So, where are we now?
Started with 30,000 customers when lockdown was announced, now serving 3,00,000 customers!
Introducing bigbasket Smart Store — A set of bbinstant machines placed in apartments. It’s a 24/7 vending machine which contains essential items ranging from fresh fruits & vegetables, dairy, snacks, beverages. We are piloting and hope to scale it soon across India to enable quick, hygienic and contactless shopping experience.
Continuously innovating and doing our best to serve more :)
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