Zomato-owned Blinkit plans to go head-to-head with its rival Urban Company, a segment leader, by making carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other service partners at home available.
According to data sourced from the ministry of corporate affairs, Goyal ceased to be a director at Prosus-backed Urban Company – earlier known as Urban Clap – with effect from February 15. He was appointed to its board on March 15 last year.
“The (home services) project at Blinkit is at an early experimentation stage, and no details have been finalised yet with staff,” one of the people aware of the development told ET.
Zomato declined to comment. Urban Company did not respond to ET’s email. On Wednesday, Zomato’s shares closed 2.15% higher at Rs 54.94 on the BSE.
Online publication Entrackr was the first to report this development.
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At-home services segmentBlinkit is set to join several other startups trying to compete with Accel-backed Urban Company in the at-home services space. ET was the first to report on May 24 last year that Flipkart was planning to enter the segment. The Walmart-backed ecommerce player has since scaled up the service.
Security management startup Mygate, which had launched the service on its own, later started hosting Urban Company’s offerings on its app after insurance provider Acko and Urban Company co-led a Rs 100 crore funding round in the startup.
ET reported on April 6 last year that Tata Digital was also looking to enter the at-home services space. Over the last two years, several companies have been attempting to dent Urban Company’s dominance in a sector that saw several players fail to find traction and survive a funding slowdown in 2016-17.
The at-home services market has been challenging. Early movers were lead-generation companies such as JustDial and Sulekha, but by 2015 Urban Company and Housejoy, among others, had decided to take it a step further by controlling the experience as well.
Startups like TaskBob and Doormint either shut down or moved on to other businesses.
Blinkit’s plans to enter the at-home services space comes at a time when quick commerce companies are trying to increase their average order value (AOV) from existing customers, ET reported on December 20. ET also reported on January 5 that Blinkit’s founders Albinder Dhindsa and Rishi Arora have made it a priority to increase AOV this year.
Blinkit’s AOV dropped sequentially to Rs 553 in October-December, from Rs 568 in July-September.
The fall in AOV was on account of the platform getting bigger and expanding its business, Dhindsa said during Zomato’s December-quarter earnings call with analysts.
“The number of use cases that we can potentially cater to customers – that eventually helps the platform increase our wallet share – those are going up. That causes variability in the average ticket size,” he had said.
“We are confident in our ability to be able to break even at lower average ticket sizes because some of these use cases as they come up are also potentially high commission categories for us…that gives us the confidence that the business will evolve in its average order size as it expands beyond grocery. But at the same time, we should be able to make the economics of the business work,” Dhindsa had said.