My 2016 new year resolution was to let go of a lot of things which I wasn’t using – i.e. go minimalistic and I am quite proud to say that I have almost achieved it*.
But then, I just realized that I have Chromecast lying around which I haven’t really used for over 8 months now.
I decided to sell it off on Quikr and closed the deal with a buyer for Rs. 1,000/. Though the buyer stays within 10 Kms range, we opted for Quikr pickup/delivery to save time. Now, here comes the interesting part.
- Quikr is charging the buyer Rs. 100 for the delivery service.
- Quikr is charging me (the seller) Rs. 249 as ‘convenience fee’.
That is, ~35% margin for a product which costs only Rs. 1000 and most importantly, within 8 kms distance range.
Now that begs an important question: What business are you in? What business is Quikr in?
Logistics or Marketplace?
If it is in logistics business, there is no incentive for me (and even the buyer) to use Quikr and pay 35% ‘convenience fee’. I’d rather hire Dunzo (oh! Quikr is readying its Dunzo competitor) and pay ~Rs. 100.
That is, should convenience fee be a function of Product price ? Product weight ? Dimension? Distance?
For Quikr, there is no clarity. Dunzo, on the other hand is much more clear – they charge based on distance. OLX is all clear – they don’t get into transaction (though they are leaving money on the table).
Quikr could have actually done a much deeper job as they are enabling transaction and know the transaction value.
Think about it – Dunzo (or any other courier service) only knows that it has to ship a ‘package’, while Quikr knows what’s inside the package and price. Quikr can own the entire pie of transaction if they play smart.
But the company decides to follow a standard algo which makes the entire process look dumb (really makes no sense for a small transaction like this).
In fact, by following such standard and meaningless algo, Quikr is hurting its core business – the marketplace (I won’t really use it again and save myself from a situation like this).
Notes to Quikr team: When your core business doesn’t have a highly differentiating value proposition, play nice. You can’t afford to be pricey.
Update: So Quikr tells me that they have standard price policy per category. Whoa!! This is so sad – the logistics arm basically doesn’t speak to product team.
*Soon, I will share my experience of selling my car/bullet/home theater etc on different marketplaces.
