A peek into the Tech lab of London’s most ambitious, on-demand logistics startup
There are times I find myself sat at my desk, asking myself:
“How can we drive our on-demand services to bring a real-time experience to our users!?”
As Quiqup’s CTO, this question drives me to automate as many jobs as possible, find ways to intelligently route our Quiqees (drivers) from one job to the next and to manage multiple ones at the same time. Since the early days before the Quiqup app was even released, my tech quest has been to use automation to achieve maximum efficiency throughout the whole product ecosystem. To deliver a real experience to all our users.
Back in 2014, when we developed our MVP web-app, we never imagined we would create a multi-sided platform, providing services to both people and entities. The “Custom Pickups” in the MVP could get you any item delivered within the hour, by just typing in the items into a text box. Then we started partnering up with businesses (i.e. Whole Foods Market, iSmash and many more) to give consumers more choice at better prices (“Partner Pickups”).
As users demand grew, the volume of Tech had to grow rapidly to ensure automation and real-time feedback.
To sustain the rapid growth of Retail Partnership, my team created: a menu builder for retailers to upload their catalogues, a tablet app for retailers to receive and manage incoming orders, and an automated invoice tool for automating accounting. Together with an app for our Quiqees so we can track them in real-time as well as make sure they have the right info in hand.
Quiqup’s Tech shines as it learns from data how to streamline complex operations and deliver a real-time experience for consumers, businesses and Quiqees.
Just picture this scenario. Consumers in a certain location go onto the Quiqup app to get their charger. When they go on the Electronics section of the app through the checkout, we can estimate their intent to purchase. On the other hand, we need to make sure that in the same area of the store there are enough Quiqees and that the partner (i.e. iSmash) will have the charger in stock and ready to go. Bottom line is Tech needs to reach real-time levels of efficiency to estimate both demand (intent to purchase and other jobs in progress) and supply (presence of Quiqees and partners operations). Ultimately to give consumers an accurate ETA of the Quiqee all the way through the journey.
And this is just the beginning, our Retail Partnership’s Tech lives in a much bigger environment. Data gathered through Tech drives efficiency in Operations, gives Legal ranges to determine KPIs to be included in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) offered to retailers, push better UX design for users and much, much more.
I envision a completely automated future where Quiqup app users get only the best option for their products, without even having to browse different stores.
If they want their charger, they’re just going to type in “charger”, and Quiqup will give them the best option, according to distance and price of all the retailers that have that product. I envision Quiqees to use their specific mode of transport (bicycles, scooters and cars) given specific area, time and weather. And business partners enjoy effortless operations. This can be achieved only with data-driven automation, which ultimately leads to real-time experience.
Next time, our Community Manager Nic will tell you more about how he engages with our fleet of Quiqees.
Danny, CTO & Co-founder
