Grab on Wednesday announced the pilot launch of its new service called GrabSupermarket, which is not quite the same as the GrabMart that is already available. According to the company, GrabSupermarket is its first foray into an online grocery delivery service that’ll be operating from a fully functional and stocked dark store.
From GrabSupermarket, clients would be able to access a wide variety of household needs ranging from fresh produce, frozen food, packaged food, and beverages to homecare, household products, personal health, supplements, and more. Products will be available at low prices, and with zero delivery fees. There will also be no minimum order, or a cap on orders.
Clients will only be charged for their order once it gets delivered, and payment will be done via the Grab app so as to keep the process cashless and contactless. So, what’s the difference between GrabMart and GrabSupermarket then?
GrabMart is meant to be an on-demand grocery delivery service, which means it can deliver urgent goods within 30 minutes. On the other hand, GrabSupermarket is replicating a traditional grocery shopping, where clients may not necessarily be rushing to purchase goods. Instead, they’ll be buying in bulk.
GrabSupermarket doesn’t offer 30-minute deliveries or even same-day deliveries, it’ll come the next day. Users can pick a delivery slot for between 8PM to 10.30PM on the next day. It’s worth noting that GrabMart actually doesn’t have a minimum order requirement either, but the difference is that there will be delivery fees that depend on each store.
The fact that there are zero delivery fees sounds great, but one has to wonder if GrabSupermarket’s low prices will actually be as low as claimed. Furthermore, while notifying consumers before removing unavailable items from their order is a good call, the fact that cancelling one’s entire order has to be done through the Help Centre seems more trouble than it’s worth. Grab would have to be able to keep up with the potential volume of users in order for order cancellations to go smoothly. Hopefully, a better solution to cancelling one’s orders can be found later.
Lack of convenience
Accessing GrabSupermarket in the Grab app also is not as convenient as one would hope for yet, since it’s not a little tile of its own like “Mart”. Of course, all it takes is some manual information input here and there, but still, customers love any convenience they can get.
It’s still in a very early stage of development though, so I’m sure that if the demand is there and consistent, Grab won’t hesitate to add a special tile for the service. From what we know of the service thus far, it seems like a competitor for MyGroser, which also utilizes dark or cloud stores of its own for its online grocery delivery service.
This article was originally published by Vulcan Post.
