Goodbox — what it is and what it isn’t
Most innovations are difficult to explain in their entirety — especially in the early days. People try to look for some frame of reference so they can build on something they already understand.
Goodbox is unique. There’s nothing like it globally. Here’s an attempt to try and explain what Goodbox is and, more importantly, what it isn’t.
What it is
There are multiple ways to understand what Goodbox is:
→ Commerce enabler platform
→ Largest & most comprehensive booking engine in India
→ Mega App for commerce
What it’s NOT
There are misconceptions about what it is. Here’s an attempt to bust those:
→ It is NOT a chat / messaging app
→ It is NOT a personal concierge app
→ It is NOT like JustDial with chat either
Problems Goodbox addresses
What is Goodbox?
Goodbox provides businesses with an app presence (Mini App) within 5 minutes. They can create their store / Mini App within the Goodbox Mega App. This store comes with the business’ own branding, a messaging tab, menu tab & with online payments enabled — all this for a small fee plus a payment gateway charge. These businesses treat their Mini App on Goodbox like their own app and invite their customers to buy from them online.
Goodbox saves a business the trouble of creating its own app by giving them a Mini App. They can now create their Mini App in 5 minutes.
Consumers use the Goodbox Mega App to buy from multiple businesses, through their Mini Apps, directly. No middlemen.
Consumers get access to a wide variety of businesses on the Goodbox Mega App. Since they can buy from multiple businesses on Goodbox, they are more likely to use a business’ Mini App on the Goodbox app than the individual app of the business. They can either buy using the menu or by messaging the business and then paying the business online itself.
Comparisons to understand Goodbox better
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Commerce enabler platform, that’s messenger-based
A messenger like WhatsApp is your connect between your personal contacts. Imagine what a commerce-enabled WhatsApp would look like.
When you walk into a shop you see store employees and products. A customer can either browse products or walk up to a store employee in case they have questions. Once they’ve decided to buy, the customer proceeds to the cashier to make the payment. Hence, the three key components of most shops / businesses are — people, products and payment.
A commerce-enabled app should have these three components. That’s what a business gets on the Goodbox app when they create their Mini App. Shops have a chat tab, a booking tab and a payment option. A customer is encouraged to view the menu / pricing tab to select a product / service. In case they are stuck or have any queries, they can interact with the business over chat. And once they decide to make a purchase, they can go ahead and pay the business on the app.
Goodbox is a commerce-enabled app where you may discover many of your trusted businesses. You can tap on that business in the Goodbox app and buy directly from that shop. That gives the shop maximum control.
Largest & most comprehensive booking engine in India
India has seen multiple booking engines in the last ~12 years. There have been online booking engines for flights, hotels, train tickets, bus tickets, cabs, food ordering, product commerce, movie tickets, mobile recharges, and long tail services among others.
Even with all of this just ~4-5% of the country went online. India has ~40–45 million online buyers at last count. Goodbox proposes to get the rest of the 95% of the country online. When we say online, we don’t necessarily mean online payments. We refer to online bookings / ordering / using a new channel to buy or pay. An online booking is a move towards adopting convenience and using new channels over the older ones like a call / visit to a physical store.
A supermarket may have a catalog of FMCG products as their menu, with a booking flow that allows customers to order (home delivery or store pick-up or in-store payment). This forms a booking engine. Or, a customer may place an order over a message but that becomes inefficient for many businesses — hence a higher thrust towards booking engines as the primary flow.
Some businesses / processes need messaging due to the unstructured nature of the category or the query. For instance a customer support call can have multiple flows and hence a booking engine for that may be inefficient. That’s when messaging helps best. For all things else, a booking engine should work best.
Goodbox, in the future, will have an app developer eco-system that may make booking engines for different verticals while Goodbox creates the commerce platform. Goodbox will give these developers the opportunity to heart / make features for one of the largest set of merchants in India.
Mega app for commerce
There are multiple forms of commerce — product commerce, service commerce, daily commerce, long-tail commerce. We have largely seen product commerce and long-tail commerce in India. We are yet to see a large player in daily commerce and service commerce. Goodbox enables all these forms of commerce.
It will enable businesses across the economy to get a Mini App on the Goodbox app as their own app presence. If a business has their own Mini App, then Goodbox can integrate with their back-end system via an API. Every business has a set of loyal customers. Now all of them can be invited to the Goodbox app to buy from all their trusted businesses in one place.
A mall usually attracts more traffic than a stand-alone store. Every store in the mall gains from the traffic that another store attracts and vice versa. The common good is greater than what each of the parties could have achieved individually. That’s sort of how different businesses gain from being on the Goodbox platform. Every time a business invites its customers on the Goodbox app, every other business benefits. Consumers prefer a mall approach where they can buy from multiple stores. Similarly, it’s easier for businesses to get consumers to use the Goodbox app than to use their individual apps. Making Goodbox a Mega App.
Why consumers will love Goodbox
→ They need just one app to directly buy from millions of businesses. Today customers can buy from 100+ categories in Bangalore, on the Goodbox app!
→ Goodbox creates a better way in which customers can buy from a business by creating new methods and enhancing the existing — consumers love placing grocery orders using the catalog of their favourite supermarket. Did they have this flexibility while placing an order over a phone call? Did they have the flexibility to pay online to their supermarket? These are new age conveniences that create new habits.
→ Unlike infrequent-commerce, Goodbox is used across frequently-used categories like groceries, restaurants, canteens, public transport etc. Making it a habit to use the product almost every day.
→ Many existing customers say they love the convenience of placing an order over the app without having to call a business. If the business misses their call, customers have to call the business back and place the order. If the order is long, then some item may go missing. The app helps them see a menu / pricing before they can place an order. Since most of these businesses are not online, this information really helps customers.
What Goodbox is NOT
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It’s NOT a chat / messaging app
Chat / messaging is a small part of Goodbox. Chat is not great for everything and in most cases, is slower than a booking engine. In a few cases booking engines are annoying and can slow you down. A customer support query is a great example of a booking engine slowing you down. All of us get annoyed when we are encountered with multiple options on IVR when we call a telco with a complaint. All we want to do is rattle away the complaint.
There are different forms of commerce and in most cases booking engines improve discovery and make decision-making simpler. That’s what Goodbox aims to solve for a large part of the economy by democratising technology for businesses. These businesses can either create their own booking engine, use a booking engine created by Goodbox, or one created by the app developer eco-system — while messaging is provided as a common tab to every business on the app.
The Goodbox DNA is to make things simpler and to give greater control to a user and a business. On Goodbox a user can choose whether they want to use messaging or a booking engine to place their order. From what we see on Goodbox, most consumers use the booking engine since that’s much faster than asking questions over chat. And we see that as the way forward. A user’s privacy is given a lot of importance. Their number is not shared with a business by default. Only they can share their personal details with a business.
Many messaging apps act as middlemen and broker an order or mediate between the consumer and the business. There’s either a customer support executive or some form of automation (that may break given the different languages and heavy use of colloquial lingo) that site in between, making the to and fro inefficient and annoying.
That’s NOT the Goodbox model. Goodbox works more like the technology platform that hearts this interaction. Very similar to the way Facebook hearts the technology that helps friends connect.
Goodbox is an enabler. Not a doer.
It is NOT a personal concierge app
India has seen a whole lot of personal concierge apps since the launch of Magic in the US. We believe they solve a pain point for long tail queries.
Example: my car just broke-down. Can you help? My maid didn’t show up today. Can you help? Need a cake at 2 am for a b’day surprise. Can you help?
These are long tail queries — you don’t encounter them everyday. May be once a year. Personal concierge apps are adept at helping consumers where real human intervention is required and all where all search engines fail. However, consumer won’t use these for the daily. Why would you like a personal concierge app to order groceries on your behalf when you can do it faster yourself? Customers don’t migrate to anything that slows them down.
While we think that there’s a great market for these apps to serve the rich at a premium fee, that’s not the Goodbox DNA or vision. In fact, at some point, we’d love to integrate a personal concierge app within the Goodbox app, as a business entity. This business could help consumers with on-demand answers to problems that any particular business can’t cater to.
We don’t like to be an intermediary in conversations between businesses and their consumers. We believe that businesses know their trade better than us. What most of them do lack is technology — and that’s the Goodbox expertise that’s lent to businesses at scale and at an affordable cost. The cost of building this technology is amortised over millions of businesses, making it affordable for every business to now be on app without having to create one themselves.
It’s sort of like e-mail. Imagine if every company had to create its own e-mail software to be able to receive e-mails! Goodbox is doing to commerce what Gmail did to e-mail. Gmail democratised e-mail. Goodbox democratises technology that helps businesses conduct commerce on app.
Goodbox is more of a usage-based app. What does that mean? Let’s understand that better with an example. Imagine you move to a new area. You now need to discover some good restaurants around you to fix you your dinner everyday. So, you visit a restaurant discovery site to discover this business. After trying out 4–5 different restaurants, you zero in on 1 or 2. Then you buy from them alternately for the next few months. So, you used a restaurant discovery site for discovery once a quarter but used the restaurants for the next 90 days over the quarter. That’s usage vs discovery. You discover once in a while but use almost everyday.
It’s the usage case that Goodbox caters to and simplifies. While discovery will be solved on Goodbox in the long run, we believe that vertical focused players do a great job at it. Again, they can create their app presence on Goodbox to help customers discover better — while consumers keep buying from their trusted businesses directly using the Goodbox app as an easier way to go about the daily. So, even a restaurant discovery engine could also be on the Goodbox app and customers could discover restaurants from within Goodbox itself. Why would they be on Goodbox, you may ask? The same reason they are on Facebook and Twitter — because every customer will be on Goodbox.
It’s NOT JustDial on chat
JustDial did a stupendous job of helping us get the phone number of any business we wanted — within seconds. A JustDial on chat would do that over messaging — probably faster than anyone else.
However, that’s not what Goodbox is. In fact Goodbox is all about the interaction and commerce that takes place once you call the business. Goodbox is one app where you could discover, evaluate, buy and pay a business — all without leaving the app.
Conclusion
We hope this gives you a sneak peak into what Goodbox is and what it plans to be. You can call it a mega app, an Operating System or an eco-system for commerce.
The broader theme revolves around gaps, aspirations and large trends that point towards smart phones, an aspirational Asian populace, faster & cheaper internet, and businesses / consumers seeking greater control.
Goodbox is catering to those gaps and aspirations while it creates a platform that enables, provides control and influences all parties towards a better way of doing things.
If you’re a business, we invite you to create your Mini App today!
