India’s taxi hailing app Ola closes food and grocery delivery operations
India-based taxi-hailing app Ola has announced the closure of its hyper local food and grocery delivery operations, Ola Café and Ola Store. In a notice posted on the company’s official blog yesterday (1o March), Ola said: “The Ola Store app and Ola Café category on the Ola app will not be available from this week onwards.
“We understand that you will miss receiving your favorite food or your daily groceries within minutes from our respective services. But then, all good experiments have to come to an end and we are happy that you were part of this journey!”
Ola Café was available in four cities and accessible within the main Ola app. Ola store, a separate app was available in three cities.
As you can tell from the volume of stories that Post&Parcel has published about India’s food and grocery delivery sector, this is a crowded, intensely competitive business and a number of other delivery start-ups have also cut back their activities and coverage in recent months.
Local sources report that Ola Café offered only a “very limited selection of dishes from nearby restaurants” which meant that it struggled to compete with bigger, and more specialised players like FoodPanda.
The grocery market, meanwhile, is going to be an even tougher arena in 2016, as Amazon is reportedly set to transform its Kirana Now offering into a fully-fledged grocery delivery service operating in major cities across India.
