Online ordering has become the most convenient for of shopping these days. Ordering grocery through apps, which reaches you within 90 minutes was the recent trend that everyone was falling in for with the spread of apps like Grofers and LocalBanya.
Remember we started Flipkarting just to get best deals on books? Ordering books over Flipkart did take a while, like a day or two in major cities. Now, it’s going to be at your doorstep in flat one hour. It’s going to be no different from ordering food from a local food joint.
Books are now a dominant online category accounting for about 15% of online shopping. There are various portals, which have been launched in the country over the time where one can buy books, rent them, buy e-versions, buy used ones, or even sell books.
Mumbai-based local discovery and delivery service called Scootsy has now signed an exclusive partnership with India Book Distributors (IBD) to deliver books in 60 minutes to major parts of the city. Scootsy customers can also search, discover and order from a wide range of books across a range of genres from IBD, which is one of India’s dominant importer of English language books, magazines and education and training materials.
Its not all rosy yet as the service is minimal and restricted to a 60 minute delivery between Cuffe Parade and Juhu.
The company at the launch of the service should also have thought of the central line areas in the city, for quicker spread. They are restricting themselves to a small boundary for now.
“Our goal is to be the goto app for the instant gratification of all impulse and need based purchases,” said Rishi Khiani, Managing Director of Scootsy, speaking on the launch occasion.
The company had a 150% jumps in number of orders last month, it states. The press release also says that in addition to books, Scootsy also delivers for gift shops, gourmet food stores, fashion boutiques, home stores, stationers, cosmetic brands and essentials.
We wonder if that is just ‘in addition’ to books or are books ‘in addition’ to its other online businesses! We dug into the website and were surprised to see not a single book on site, not even a bookmark for that matter! The entire site just has one thing-food. There is no mention of books- despite the launch of this new service. Weird, isn’t it?
