Fish Inc.’s groundbreaking chat-based ordering platform connects food and grocery business owners with their customers while allowing them to retain their profits and customer relationships
Since March 2020, businesses in the food and grocery industry have been forced to innovate in order to survive. One of the groundbreaking concepts that emerged from this coronavirus-induced process shift involved remote ordering for contactless pickup. This system allowed customers to pick up groceries, meals, or other culinary needs with minimal personal interactions.
While this Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) model has been successfully incorporated by large grocery chains, numerous small businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area are still lagging in this area due to lack of sophisticated online infrastructure and funding to set them up. To address this issue, a cutting edge-tech startup Fish Inc. (short for “for instant shopping”) is launching an industry-first, BOPIS-enabler chat-based grocery and food ordering platform to directly connect small businesses with their customers and help them deliver a seamless BOPIS experience.
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Using the Fish app, people can order groceries and food from their nearby stores through Fish’s smart ordering platform that is embedded into the chat interface. They can then schedule a pickup (as per their convenient time) with that business through chat.
Fish is currently in its closed beta stage and is scheduled to launch its open beta on February 14, 2022. As of now, the company will be catering its services to the Fremont and Sunnyvale areas of California before looking at more expansion opportunities.
“Fish was built to support a small family-owned grocery store in the San Francisco Bay Area that was on the verge of shutting down during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We chose Valentine’s Day for our public debut to signify our love for local small businesses that are the lifeline of our economy. We had a great response with our closed beta release, and we are looking forward to seeing more businesses adopt Fish as they work hard to improve their bottom line.” stated Chandana Raghunath, Co-founder of Fish Inc.
By utilizing an exclusive chat-based platform, Fish eliminates the middleman that typically separates customers and business owners. “We wanted to give people an opportunity to chat directly with a store owner or restaurant staff,” said Raghunath. “Our platform is intelligently designed to make shopping for everyday items more convenient and economical for the store’s customers while also making order receiving and servicing smooth and cost effective for SMB grocery retailers, restaurants and cloud kitchens.”
“Fish also offers the businesses a two-minute onboarding process,” Raghunath explained. “We have tried to create an easy-to-use application where employee training and onboarding isn’t going to be a hassle. Our platform eliminates the need for small businesses to spend hours every week syncing and updating their inventory to stay current.”
With no sky-high commission rates, a powerful Customer Data Platform and 1:1 chat interface, Fish Inc. is geared to help their partners save money and build more meaningful customer relationships.
Namaste Plaza, Fremont has been operational on Fish for several months now. The store owner, Sai expressed, “In the last couple of years, our email and phone pickup orders have been more in number, and it would take up a lot of our employee time. Fish platform has eased that; now accepting pickup orders only takes a couple of clicks. Also, thanks to the chat platform our customers like us better now! ”
During the beta testing, customer feedback on Fish’s platform was overwhelmingly positive. “I am a working mom of two and cannot sit at home waiting for groceries to be delivered. This is where I find Fish’s grocery pickup app to be super convenient-especially with its chat capability. I don’t worry about out-of-stock items anymore!” shared Anne, one of the early users of Fish.
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Deepthi Thiyagarajan is one of Fish’s early beta testers. As a future mom, she found the service indispensable during the pandemic. According to Deepthi, “Fish has saved me time and reduced my exposure risks at the grocery store. I have been shopping at the store for months, and I am glad they remember my substitution requests. The best part is that my order never goes wrong.”
Since a chat-based platform maintains a written record of each order, Fish minimizes the need for exchanges, returns, or refunds, which benefits the bottom line of each participating business.
Although the pandemic era for the food and grocery industry is expected to fizzle out one day, the convenience innovations created during this time are likely to stay. Moreover, since most small businesses lack the necessary infrastructure or capital reserves to join today’s most prominent online platforms, Fish helps them leverage the power of chat to achieve similar results.
