What happens after you click “buy”? — Under Meesho’s hood

Understanding Fulfillment & Experience when we don’t have warehousing or logistics.

Here’s what you may know — We became the most downloaded e-commerce app globally in 2021 😎

Here’s what you may not know — We have no warehousing. We don’t own logistics. We have no delivery fleet. We’re a pure-play ‘tech-first’ platform 🖥️

Why?

By outsourcing warehousing and logistics, we’re able to obsessively focus on our tech. But ‘outsourcing’ doesn’t mean “staying out of it.” We have a well-defined ecosystem, which includes three key players:

The ‘Fulfillment’ team at Meesho

• This team kick starts the journey of a product.
• A purely ‘operations’ team, we alert our sellers when an order is placed.
• The Fulfillment team then coordinates with our 3PL (3rd Party Logistics) partners to ensure the product is picked up & delivered.

The ‘3PL’ Partner

• This portion is outsourced to a number of players who ensure a delivery/return is made. These are the folks we trust our products with.
• Coordinating with the relevant 3PL partners is key to the Fulfillment team’s success.
• The above point is critical because it determines customer satisfaction — packaging quality, time taken to deliver etc.

The ‘Experiences’ team at Meesho

• The team updates on the whereabouts of the product, & alerts our customers about any roadblocks in delivery time. In all, we care for the ‘experience’ of a customer.
• This team obsesses over ‘customer delight’ — how happy are our customers? How can we do better to serve our customers?
• We don’t focus on the app, but care for delivery times, return pick-up times et al.

For us, an app that caters to 5% of Indian households — that’s approximately 10 million households — the well-oiled coordination between these three teams is no small feat. Tech is key to success for our ‘Fulfillment’ & ‘Experience’ (F&E) functions.

A bridge of fluent communications

Within the F&E functions, the primary role of tech at Meesho is to act as the bridge of fluent, real-time communication with the different stakeholders.

They are the central engineers between our various products

• Sellers receive information regarding the products that need to be dispatched, deliveries that have been made, and the return of orders via the seller app.
• Customers receive feedback and updates regarding their orders on the customer app.
• 3PL partners get real-time information about what shipments to pick up and deliver, thanks to API integrations.
• F&E team members using the admin app and analytics dashboard, push out our information into the demo pools of the 3PL partners, and their information into our sources.

Lots of moving parts, we know. 🤯

Our engineering team’s efficiency in orchestrating communication between all stakeholders was most evident during the initial stages of the COVID-19 lockdowns. During this period, containment zones were changing rapidly and orders were being placed real-time.

We needed to build an infra that could identify delivery locations, tag serviceable postcodes, and be iterable for better efficiency, even as the fulfilment processes took shape in the relatively new ecosystem.

Build quickly. Iterate later

Once we identified the challenge, our Strategy and Ops team engaged in a solutioning session with the Product team::

Our monolith infra could already identify and filter out unserviceable locations in certain cities and pin codes. But we needed to widen its range and introduce more variables. For eg: Is the product “essential” or “non-essential”? Is the delivery location in a red zone or an orange zone?

We needed to replicate the on-ground situation on our app in real-time, while also setting the right expectations for our customers.

Once we knew the solution, tech and product teams wrote the Product Requirements Document and went about building the product. It was a classic example of Speed > Perfection, one of our 9 core mantras.

Within a week, we had worked out high-key solutions within the limits of our tech infrastructure.

1.0, 2.0…n.0

Lockdown is just one of the many instances where tech-led us into efficiency. Our dark (way back in the) past reveals stories of manually tackling F&E challenges. Story for another day 🤪

How we evolved:

Dynamic allocation engine: Before 2019, our F&E champs had to rely on one 3PL partner to serve in each location. But as the number of our daily orders skyrocketed, late feedback started choking us. Enter: our Dynamic Allocation Engine. With this iteration on our app, we were able to allocate the right 3PL partner — among the many serving the same pin code — based on cost & performance. Now, we’re able to deliver orders faster and serve our customers better.

Fraud user detection and elimination: Being a truly open marketplace we have to manage the experience of both our users and sellers. This means not penalising one group for the mistake of the other.

Our Data Science team has built a strong prediction model to resolve these disputes based on hundreds of user and supplier attributes. This model feeds into decisions around wrong fulfilment complaints and supplier claims among areas of conflict. We have incorporated quite a few frictions and checks in the order flow of potential fraudulent users. Meanwhile, our “good” customers and suppliers have a seamless experience on Meesho.

Supplier Payments: In February 2022, we introduced two seller-friendly policies to improve the ease of doing business on the platform:

✅ 0 Penalties: We’ve made all suppliers immune to penalties. They can now earn higher margins without worrying about getting penalised for accidental missteps and paying fines and payments.

✅ 7-Day Payments (vs current 15-day cycle): We’ve automated payouts, this translates to more immediate capital so suppliers can focus on business growth.

Huge thanks to Dipti Tejwani and Venkush Khede for all their input.

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