Dive Brief:
- South Asian food marketplace Quicklly announced last week that it has commenced delivery operations in the San Francisco Bay Area — its first expansion market outside of its base in Chicago.
- Customers spanning from San Francisco to San Mateo, California, now have access to the Quicklly marketplace, which hosts numerous local South Asian restaurants, caterers and markets — the majority of which are small businesses that are not on other delivery apps.
- Co-founder Keval Raj said the platform has already onboarded more than 30 vendors in the Bay Area, for which Quicklly operates free, same-day delivery services.
Dive Insight:
Quicklly, a marketplace founded by South Asian immigrants that targets small-scale vendors who lack a significant online presence or the funds to invest in one, has expanded to the San Francisco Bay Area in part because of the city’s high concentration of South Asian residents.
Its arrival also means that it's entering a field crowded with boutique online food delivery services, with competitors such as Farmstead, Imperfect Foods, Good Eggs and Asian food grocer Weee, which have all been beefing up their operations in the region this year.
Quicklly's use of artificial intelligence-driven technology to identify vendors’ most popular items is par for the course in the tech hub. According to Quicklly, their services offer a cheaper alternative to often prohibitively expensive third-party online delivery commissions for small-scale vendors. San Francisco local city officials have said that the city’s 15% cap on delivery fees charged to restaurants will remain in effect until indoor dining is again allowed at full capacity.
Raj said that the platform already has more than 30 Bay Area vendors. The proprietor of one of those vendors, Krishna Bhupal of India Foods, said that their daily order numbers were growing 100% week-over-week and that the service was more affordable for restaurants than other delivery services.
Quicklly’s model seems to have enjoyed success in the Chicago metro area with a customer base of almost 15,000 and more than 60 vendors. Over the course of 2020, the company said its average order size has doubled, its customer base has quadrupled and revenue has grown seven-fold.
Online grocer Weee, which also strategically targets shoppers seeking Asian grocery products, has seen considerable success in Northern California, boasting 700% revenue growth year-over-year. Weee diverges from Quicklly in that it sources individual products to sell as opposed to Quicklly’s marketplace model, where third-party vendors list their offerings.
The Weee model is designed so the grocer “can maintain the quality,” according to founder and CEO Larry Liu, whereas Quicklly gives up control to eliminate the expense of curating their own inventory, instead providing a marketplace and online operations for individual small-scale vendors with existing and loyal customer bases.
