The beginning of business model

We know we are in low-margin business, but it's our job to find a business model that works!
How on earth this could be that once you've formed a desire to order food delivery, suppliers cannot find a price which works for you and is profitable for them. At least in many cases there must be a model.
Let's take Ukraine (Eastern Europe) for example: a cost of one minute of a descent call-center service is 1 UAH. An order could be somewhere between 200 and 700 UAH. Whether you're buying tooth paste or water mellon our goal is to get you to your favorite choice as quickly as possible. Thanks to our technology this is quite easy, but still takes about 20 seconds for each position on average. Plus 2 minutes of picker's time to find and pick position (if routing was done correctly), plus 5 minutes of overhead on each order. A minute of picker's time – 0.5 UAH. So for say 10 positions order (100 UAH) a cost would be (20*10/60)*1UAH + (2*10+5)*0.5UAH = 16 UAH. Plus 35 UAH delivery = 51 UAH. Ultimately, a currency does not matter – UAH or USD or CHF – most buyers are reluctant to pay 51% premium for convenience of easy buying.
Sophisticated customers may pay for economy of their time and with pick-up–in–store option may go for 16% premium on such small order. The question is, are there enough of such customers to keep service sustainable and profitable.
Another option is to go for volume. When its 50 positions order (750+ UAH) the cost is (20*50/60)*1UAH + (2*50+5)*0.5UAH + 35 UAH (delivery) = 105 UAH = 14% premium. If you order from big good outskirts-based supermarket, a 14% may be equal to price delta comparing to the local (more expensive) supermarket. So you got your food–picking and delivery almost for free. I guess this is a good option. Now, the question would be how to explain this to buyers. A message could be "You've seen this ad, and don't tell afterwards you cannot do the math" :)

Public stats

Grocery retail in Eastern Europe is of major interest for us now. Whatever public data we will find and structure (in a more or less meaningful way) we are going to openly publish it. So here is the tiny first portion mostly for Ukraine.
No warranty, "as is", etc.

We try to share because we care :)

How do you buy groceries?

We published results for our "How do you buy groceries" survey.
Only Ukrainian version is available now at front page of kabanchi.com

Kabanchi.com @ SCTest 10 - Presentation

Presentation made at Startup Crash Test 10, January 29th 2010
Video http://bit.ly/9SGKJl
Slides http://bit.ly/czMgxT

Survey: How do you buy groceries?

Just three questions at www.kabanchi.com - we want to know you better, please.

Contacts

For all inquiries please contact Yegor Anchishkin, CEO.
email: yegor at gvmachines dot com
skype: yegor_anchishkin

Team, Team, Team

I even love the word "team".
So far we can say that:
- there are five of us
- Yegor Anchishkin is founder and CEO
- a bright partner (non-engineer) will be announced sometime soon
- three very talented engineers are working on technology

We also have Advisory Board, and members will be announced soon too.
Several pieces of technology are engineered by subcontractors, but all IP belongs to GVMachines.