Qlik Cloud Enables Buyk To Rapidly Spin Up Online Grocery Shopping Operations in New York City
The phenomenon of web-based, at-your-door-in-minutes, restaurant food-delivery service is widespread and commonplace nowadays, with various apps and platforms, such as Grubhub or DoorDash, providing diners with an at-home eating experience – look up a restaurant, choose what you want to eat, and your food is on its way. The same can be said about grocery shopping. Instead of walking up and down aisles with a cart, now you can create shopping lists online and order from the comfort of your home, with a personal shopper selecting items and delivering them to your doorstep. The desire for convenience, the e-commercialization of nearly every shopping experience, and the bustle and pacing of our lives has driven the creation of – and demand for – this market, whose services are now seemingly ubiquitous.
Building upon this service model, Buyk – a real-time grocery service that promises to deliver orders in 15 minutes or less – launched operations in New York City in August 2021, using Qlik for its business intelligence needs. The company leaned on the experience of its founders, who previously started and ran Samokat, one of Europe’s fastest-growing, ultrafast courier-based delivery services. Unlike services such as Instacart, which uses drivers and retail supermarkets, the company uses local bicycle couriers to pick up orders from nearby “stores” – large facilities that resemble conventional supermarkets but are not open to the public. The use of couriers and dark stores meant Buyk needed real-time intelligence and analytics to optimize its business performance and operations.
“We knew that one of our KPIs was going to be delivery time, and, using Qlik Sense SaaS, we were able to quickly create a dashboard to monitor the average speed of our deliveries,” said Sergey Zemlyanskiy, CTO at Buyk “The delivery speed dashboard and other Qlik applications have been critical in getting our business up and running quickly and efficiently, while also providing us with continuous insights into how to improve internal processes as we grow our footprint in major metropolitan areas like New York City.”
In addition to the delivery speed dashboard, Buyk has created apps that monitor volume of orders, order value, procurement, as well as dark store performance, which have helped Buyk expand its operations to nearly all of Manhattan, as well as parts of the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. The ease of rolling out the apps that Buyk developed with Qlik have been critical to these expansion efforts, underlying much of what supports Buyk’s business model. The company’s developers already had expertise with Qlik Sense, so deployment of the analytics capabilities was especially rapid, which was a core consideration in selecting Qlik.
“Since we’re in a highly competitive space, where customer expectations continue to rise, we need to easily and quickly know how each piece of our operations is doing to measure performance, establish goals, and gauge demand in a constantly changing market,” noted Zemlyanskiy. “The speed of those market changes means we need to be flexible, responsive and proactive in evolving our business strategy to deliver the best value to our customers.”
COVID continues to be a prime strategy driver. Sixty-percent of U.S. consumers bought groceries online during the pandemic, a trend only expected to continue, according to Coresight Research. Fully aware of this market dynamic, Buyk intends to open up affiliate offices, and will be targeting cities with dense populations, a ready-made base of consumers, and a highly receptive e-commerce culture.
“While we don’t know exactly what’s on the horizon, we do know that the pandemic produced a surge in demand for online grocery shopping that will continue, as many market bellwethers have indicated,” said Zemlyanskiy. “I am confident that this direction in consumption will continue, and we are eager to embrace the opportunities presented in other cities, using Qlik to build our business and provide more customers with the ability to access a fast, local grocery-delivery service.”
