Coronavirus in India: How Online Aggregators are Tackling the Outbreak?

While Physical restaurants are witnessing a hard time getting the footfalls today and most of the people working from home or ‘Self-Quarantining’, online delivery platforms are also dealing with some day to day changes to regain their customers’ trust and deliver food with utmost safety.

However, Safety is not only the issue in terms of the delivery. As retails are shutting down, people are ordering daily staples from the e-commerce websites. In the US Amazon has stated that its deliveries are getting delayed as people are stocking up the day to day essential items. The demands for products have gone up considerably. Typically it takes one or two days for prime users to get their order but now it is taking longer than usual, which is hampering their customer experience.

When it comes to food delivery platforms in India, which is yet to be considered an e-commerce marketplace, its delivery boys are the ones who are most exposed to this outbreak. The frequency of ordering food online has gone down as people are thinking twice now if they should order and outside food or not. 

Extra precautions   

Food and grocery delivery platforms are not only taking extra precautions to ensure their customers but are also making some changes to their daily operations. For example, Zomato has created internal emergency response system and is sharing its partners the WHO’s best practices to avoid the infection. Through various SMS and mails, this delivery platform is telling its customers that they are taking enough precautions and hence it is safe to order from them.    

Not only this but Swiggy has also made efforts to aware its employees about how to self-Quarantine, when witness the symptoms. It is training its people how to maintain personal hygiene by washing hands regularly and maintaining some distance.

Stringent medical tests

Meanwhile, Domino’s who has its own mechanism of delivery is communicating people about its recently adopted practices to ensure safety to its customers via messages and mails. “All our delivery riders are company employees and hired only after stringent medical checks,” the message by Domino’s says.

The protocols also says that Domino’s employees follow a 20 second hand wash and sanitation protocol every hour and their delivery bike boxes and pizza delivery hot bags are being sanitized every 4 hours.   

Online Grocery marketplace, BigBasket is providing its employees disposable masks and gloves. BigBasket also claims that it is getting medically checked all its workers to ensure safety.

Nevertheless, in uncertain times like these, where the numbers of infected persons in the country is growing with the added damage of the economy, it is very unlikely for the companies to gain its customers’ trust again anytime soon.