Farmiso - our pilot online groceries app is now Meesho Superstore!

And after an 11-month test run in 6 states, Meesho Superstore is set for integration with the core Meesho application.  

How is Superstore different from the myriad of grocery delivery apps out there?

Well, our app is not built for users with a 10-minute home delivery expectation. Quite the opposite, in fact. Superstore targets users who value price over convenience.

Our users would rather pick their order up themselves from the closest Superstore Champion (socially active people or store owners who act as a pickup point) a day after placing the order... for the right price and best quality, of course.

The model seems pretty straight forward but there were inherent cognitive challenges and user habits that hindered easy adoption of Superstore.

Add that to the fact that we have gone completely digital in the recent past. Earlier, our Champions used to physically sell our value props and acquire customers. So now, we are dealing with a host of new communication barriers between our Champions and users. There is an increased dependency on efficient UX and UI flows

Challenges galore!

Here’s how we solved these problems and drew clear demarcations between Superstore and our core Meesho platform.

Challenges in Superstore - Meesho integration

Based on our user tests and research, we zeroed in on a few critical barriers a Meesho user might encounter while using Superstore:

  1. “I assumed the items would get delivered to me!” - A Meesho customer is accustomed to getting orders delivered to their doorsteps and would not expect one of Meesho’s categories to be a self-pickup model. Moreover, most of Meesho’s users are tier 2/3/4+ residents and generally unaware of how pickup models work. This unawareness might cause anxiety and reluctance.
  2. During our 1 year pilot, we discovered our users are extremely price sensitive and give due importance to quality. Earlier, this quality assurance was done by our Champion whereas now, it will be communicated via the app.

In summary, the two major priorities while designing the integrated version were:

  1. Educating users about the self-pick up model
  2. Communicating our value propositions (high quality, low price, self-pickup) effectively on the application

Design principles

With core requirements in place, we defined 3 design guiding principles:

  1. Clear, concise text.  Visually driven. Our customers are not very comfortable with reading and tend to ignore long texts.
  2. It should communicate the Meesho value props such as low costs and high quality at all times.
  3. Customers should feel they are in a completely different environment and not just sub-category of Meesho, as Superstore has a very different working model.

Educating customers about the self-pickup model

There were two contending approaches:

  1. Self-pickup can be a negative experience for many customers. Therefore we should first inform the customer about value propositions like low costs and high quality, and subsequently introduce the self-pickup model once the buying intent has been established (the user has already added products to the cart and has proceeded for checkout)
  2. Introduce the self-pickup model upfront and show how we sell fresh/high quality items at the lowest prices. Set the expectations right from the beginning.

We stuck with the second approach because the first approach creates an expectation mismatch. Customers are expecting delivery while adding products and once they will get to know that it’s self-pickup, they will be frustrated as they have already put so much effort.

The winning model

We introduced our customers about Superstore’s working and informed them about the self-pickup procedure.

Intro GIF - We used this GIF to communicate:

  1. We have the lowest prices
  2. Best Quality
  3. And next day self-pickup
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Bringing it all together

While designing the home screen for Superstore, we covered all UX issues that Meesho users might face while using it for the first time. We also rectified certain drawbacks in the old Farmiso app.

Some issues with the Farmiso home screen were:


We resolved these issues by:

  1. Restating the value props on the home screen. This will stay here till the first order has been placed, as it plays a less important role after the user has already experienced the whole order and pickup journey once.

2. Bringing search and categories to the top as currently, over 60% of the users navigate through them to find products and place orders.

3. Setting the right pickup time expectation from the start rather than only on the cart screen. This becomes critical because next day pick up is one of our value propositions and the customer must be aware of the date of pickup.

4. Showing an offer banner and ‘Best Deals of the Day’ in the first fold itself to build the lowest price perception. We removed all the other offer banners from the home screen until the user has placed their first order. Multiple banners meant noise and confusion; we wanted the first order journey to be simple.

The final home page:

Stay tuned for... IMPACT!

The Superstore has been released to our first 5k users and the team is analysing performance and running debugging marathons. The Superstore has a phased roll-out set in place to fish out frictions and faults while constantly monitoring customer funnel and probable exit points.

Stay tuned to this page for the next edition of this article where we will disclose and discuss findings based on our next phase of launch.

Think you have the chops to take on these challenges? Visit our careers page and apply now!