Changing the way we order things
I have recently met Austin Kim. He is what we Turks call a “Turkified foreigner.” He has been living in Turkey since 1991 and can speak Turkish perfectly. He is also as familiar as the best Turkish businesspeople with the Turkish business world. Many of my friends talk about themselves like they’re business gods as soon as they achieve partial success in their careers. Kim has already established two major global super companies, Uber and Glovo. He is as humble as any person can be. We all heard about Uber and how successful it is in Turkey even though it had some legal problems. Now we will all hear about Glovo.
Glovo is a global delivery platform that can bring you literally anything. They are strong particularly in Europe as it is a Spanish company and in Latin America. Founded in January 2015 by Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud, Glovo offers a “shop on your behalf” app that promises to let you order anything locally on-demand and have it delivered “within minutes.” This includes food items (the company is McDonald’s’ official delivery partner in a number of Spanish and Italian cities and in Istanbul) but also non-food items. So far, the major names that have agreed with Glovo are McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut, Popeyes, Carl’s Jr, Bereket Döner, Taco Department, Green Salads, Frango, Pidem, Köşk Burger, Chinese & Sushi Express, Petra Roasting Co., and Supplementler. They take on new businesses all the time, so the list keeps growing. You can make your market order on Glovo; you can even ask them to bring a bag that you forgot at home to wherever you are. They promise to bring it in less than an hour. More than 50,000 people are using the app in Turkey.
It aims to make our lives easier.
However, I think the real value that Glovo offers is the data it collects and the reports that it sends to business partners which it is working with.
They track everything about the delivery. They record when it was given, when it began to be processed, when the courier arrived at the pickup destination, how many minutes he/she had to wait, which road he/she took and so on.
Kim said all this data helps businesses evaluate their own processes as well. For example, if the courier had to wait 10 minutes more than it did for other restaurants in each delivery, then it is a clear sign that restaurant has to do better in terms of timing. The application also gives insights to where your loyal customers are and their tastes.
Glovo is a second generation on-demand delivery platform, meaning that they are extremely flexible and they can add new functionality and new partners much faster than their competitors. Also, since they don’t invest creating their own fleet, they don’t have an overhead. Just like Uber, if you are already a courier, you have to apply and be accepted to work for Glovo.
All in all, they are changing the way we order things. Let’s see how much they can succeed in that.
