By Ashray Sudhir

You’ve had a long day at work. The kind where meetings and projects clash together in a blur and basic needs have no time to be met.

Water cooler conversations? Not happening. Catching up on newsletters? Not a chance.

Lunch? Well, might as well skip that too.

Okay, you think. I’ll pick up the food on the way home, put up my feet, and dig in. But the idea of standing in line and waiting for food is too painful, not after the kind of day you’ve had.

Gojek’s GoFood team understands this pain. We also like providing our users with novel ways of ordering food and bringing them delight. 🌟

That’s why we built GoFood Pickup.

With GoFood Pickup, you can get food quick and cheap from nearby food establishments without waiting in line!

Why did we build Pickup? 🍴

Consumer Research 🗣

We conducted surveys and research to get the answer to a very fundamental question: How do people usually get their food daily?

This gave us tremendous insights into the scale at which people in Indonesia use takeaway as the method to get food daily. This helped us establish a business case to serve this massive potential market. The people using takeaway are mainly divided into two segments:

• Office-goers: These customers pick up snacks, coffee, or lunch either on their way to work or during breaks. Quick food establishments are the most popular. These users are the ones who are time-sensitive and want food as fast as they can due to their work schedules.
• Home-makers: These customers pick up food daily while on their way home from work or from places near their homes to take home to their family/partner. Cheap food establishments are the most popular. These users are those who are price-sensitive as they do this regularly and frequently.

All the users who frequent takeaways had stated the wait in the queue for ordering and during food preparation as their biggest pain point.

A pain point GoFood Pickup aims to solve.

Data Insights 📊

Back in early 2019, when we were trying to understand the problems faced by our customers and what GoFood can help solve for, we figured that ~14% of our GoFood delivery orders were placed from a distance of less than a kilometre from restaurants and ~30% of these were placed from less than 500 meters from restaurants.

Moreover, during peak hours and traffic hours, it became a costlier and time-consuming affair for customers to get their food.

What is Pickup and how does it work? 👨‍🍳

GoFood Pickup is built to help customers by providing another way to get food without having to wait for it to be picked up and delivered to them. They also save those extra bucks on delivery (especially when the restaurants are located near them anyway).

All one needs to do is place a pickup order via GoFood, wait for the restaurant to prepare the food and keep it ready and fresh to be picked up by them without having to wait in line. And yes, we also provide the customers with an ETA on when the food would be ready so they can plan when to reach the restaurant accordingly. This helps ensure that everyone gets their food as fresh as the restaurant prepared it for them.

One issue with food delivery is the possibility of drivers being unavailable or declining the delivery. In the case of pickup, the orders placed on GoFood are first accepted by the merchant and then processed. The customers needn’t worry about the order getting cancelled or not being fulfilled.

All the payments for a pickup order are online payments (using the GoPay or PayLater payment methods available on GoFood). This also saves time and hassle for making payments after reaching the restaurant.

While picking up the order, the transaction is secured by a PIN exchange which ensures that the customer gets their order properly (and no one else can sneakily pick up the order they had placed and have paid for). 🙂

Once the PIN is exchanged, voila you have picked up your food! Bon Appétit!

How did we build it and where is it available? 🛠

We put together a focussed full-stack team of product engineers, quality assurance (QA) engineers, a product designer, an interaction designer, business intelligence (BI) analysts, product researchers and a product manager to work together to create this new offering for our customers.

To start with, we conducted user flow and pain points research to identify and outline what the MVP should be. Usability testing was also conducted to get feedback on the design prototypes to understand what the best flows should be for both the customers and the merchants.

We then started developing the product using Scrum and took it one sprint at a time to iteratively build the MVP. This was first launched for our GoTroops to collate feedback and get their experiences on using the offering. The initial launch was at a handful of restaurant outlets near the Gojek head office in Jakarta.

After working on the actionable feedback received from the internal rollout, we launched it as an offering post enhancements. This was done for ~50 merchants in 3 major mall-cum-business parks in central Jakarta’s Business District (SCBD). This rollout was followed by various marketing and promotional events and gradually the rollouts were increased to more outlets in Jakarta.

For generating awareness about Pickup and its value proposition, we also set up GoFood Pickup Pods for a day so that customers could try out the Pickup experience from top merchants. This event received good footfall and helped us publicise Pickup as a feature and a brand.

GoFood Pickup is currently offered by ~650 restaurants in the city of Jakarta and 50 restaurants in the city of Malang in Indonesia. It has been enabled for all customers using the Android and iOS Gojek Consumer app. 🖖

Hopefully, we’ve saved some of our hungry customers the pain of waiting for their food at the end of a long day.

With Gojek there is always a way #PastiAdaJalan ✅

What’s next in store for Pickup? ⏭

We are constantly collating feedback from customers and merchants to help improve the experience of using the product. We’re also simultaneously scaling up the rollouts to onboard more merchants at different locations/cities. Most of the important product changes and decisions came from deep-diving analysis on data, feedback from users and merchant partners, and operations.

We’d also love to hear your feedback about GoFood Pickup, the product changes you think may drive higher impact and order volume and what enhancements in the product will make it a better experience for our customers.

Terima Kasih! 🙏