Delivery for Local Shops

This startup gives Jaipur’s local businesses a delivery service on demand. A pharmacy, a sweet shop, a grocery store or a restaurant books a delivery from the merchant app, on WhatsApp or from its online store, and a nearby rider collects it within minutes.

Customers follow their order live on a map. Riders collect cash on delivery, and it is settled to the merchant’s bank account the next day.

Local shops take orders on WhatsApp and the phone every day, but have no reliable way to deliver them. Most rely on a shop boy on a scooter, which means closing the counter or saying no.

Quick-commerce companies run their own dark stores and don’t deliver for independent shops. Courier companies are built for parcels across cities, not for a box of medicines across town in forty minutes. So the shops that know their customers best are the ones least able to deliver to them.

A merchant books a delivery in one of three ways:

• the merchant app, with saved customers and addresses;
• WhatsApp, by sending the pickup and drop details, without opening any app;
• their online store, through a plugin or the API, so every online order books its own delivery.

The price is set by distance and shown before booking. A nearby rider accepts, collects the order and delivers it, with an OTP from the customer as proof of delivery. Merchants choose instant delivery within the hour, same-day delivery, or a scheduled time.

The engine decides which rider takes which order, and in what order:

• batching: orders close together and ready at around the same time go in one trip;
• preparation times: the AI predicts when a restaurant order will actually be ready, so riders arrive as it comes out of the kitchen;
• demand: busy hours, festival peaks around Diwali and Teej, and summer afternoons in Jaipur’s heat are planned for, so riders are where orders will be.

Every trip that carries two orders instead of one makes the business stronger, and the merchant’s delivery cheaper.

FIRELIFE engineers built the platform with the startup:

• the dispatch engine, with AI batching and preparation-time prediction;
• the rider app, built to run well on low-cost Android phones;
• the merchant app, WhatsApp booking, and the plugin and API for online stores;
• live tracking for customers, and cash-on-delivery reconciliation;
• the connection to ONDC, so sellers across India’s open network can book deliveries.

The founders lead operations, riders and merchants; FIRELIFE leads the technology. We review operations data and the product plan with the founders every month, and decide together what to build next.

The startup delivers across Jaipur for pharmacies, grocery stores, sweet shops and restaurants, on its own dispatch engine, and is connected to ONDC.

Udaipur and Jodhpur are next, launched with the same playbook that worked in Jaipur: merchants first, a local rider team, and the same dispatch engine.