There’s a 10% drop in Swiggy orders. How would you solve this problem?

Problem solving

I - You’re a PM at Swiggy. There’s a 10% drop in orders. How would you solve this problem?

C - Let’s first get into what Swiggy does. Swiggy is a 2-sided delivery platform that caters to both businesses and consumers. Swiggy is primarily used by consumers to order food from restaurants, but it is also used to order groceries from nearby shops and to send/receive packages from places/friends/family, etc. Restaurants and businesses register on Swiggy so that they’re able to capture revenue from consumers who do not want to visit them in-person.

Now with the problem we’re facing, is this drop in orders related to consumers ordering food from restaurants or delivery bookings?

I - Good question! We’re seeing a 10% drop in food orders.

C - Alright. I want to ask some clarifying questions before I get into the details.

1. How long have we been seeing the 10% drop? Has it been a gradual decrease or a sudden drop?

2. Are we seeing this in a particular region/city?

3. Are we seeing this in any particular device - web, mobile - android, iOS, both, tablets?

I - This drop has been observed in the past week. It’s a sudden occurrence. We’re seeing this across all regions particularly on mobile devices on all operating systems.

C - Got it. To summarize, we’re seeing a sudden 10% drop in food orders across India in the past week, primarily on mobile devices. Now that I’ve these basic details, I would like to explore why this drop is occurring by getting into external factors, the ecosystem and internal factors.

I’ll start with the easiest one but the one we have less control over - external factors.

Could we be facing the drop because of the following:

1. Bad publicity - press/social media hate?

2. Is there a new competitor that launched in the past week and that’s offering better prices and discounts?

3. Is there an external event that happened that’s affecting everyone’s food ordering behaviour? Example - pandemic, food related infections, etc?

I - Good line of reasoning but no to all - there are no external factors that have changed and even if they have, they’ve been accounted for and is not contributing to the 10% drop.

C - Alright, I’ll move onto the next  - the ecosystem.

1. Has there been a drop in restaurants nationwide that are listing on Swiggy?

2. Is there an increase in number of restaurants not accepting orders?

3. Do we have any logistics issues - have the delivery times increased? 

4. Has there been an increase in prices that consumers are seeing nationwide?

I - It is not related to the ecosystem - there are no changes there.

C - Okay, then the reason is internal and I’ll try to narrow it down now.

Has there been a recent app update that’s gone out in the past week?

I - No, nothing.

C - Okay, that helps me narrow it down even further. I want to briefly describe the consumer journey to ordering food.

1. User opens up Swiggy app on the mobile phone

2. User logs in, if they aren’t already logged in

3. User either looks at the restaurant listing, ongoing offers or searches for a restaurant.

4. They then select the items they want to order and add to cart.

5. They can add a tip, specify instructions.

6. They go ahead and click on checkout and select a payment option.

7. The user pays.

8. The Swiggy app confirms receipt of payment and indicates that the order is on its way.

9. The user is informed about the ETA and the delivery stages continuously on the app.

Am I missing anything?

I - Nope, that’s it.

C - Okay, so are we seeing a decrease in DAU?

I - No, DAU is the same.

C - Okay, that means there’s no issue with the user logging into Swiggy and searching for places to order from. Are we seeing increased cart abandonment rates?

I - Yes, bingo!

C - Okay! That means, the user is still interested in ordering and goes ahead and places the order but does not checkout/pay for it. Since I just confirmed with you that nothing changed in the ecosystem, there’s something going wrong in steps 6, 7, 8. I would use the instrumentation tool to map these steps into a funnel and look at where majority users drop off. But since we don’t have access to that here, I’ll try to make some assumptions and reason it out logically.

Reiterating, the user has decided what they want and specified instructions in step 5. Now, they need to choose a mode of payment. I’m guessing, the problem lies here - either a commonly used mode of payment is not working or Swiggy is not able to confirm receipt of payment because of which people abandon that order.

I - Very good, that’s exactly where the problem lies. Basically, users who use Paytm were not able to pay for their orders on Swiggy which is why we’re seeing a 10% drop. Now, how would you go about solving this problem ?

C - Before that, are users able to pay through Paytm (and see their money get deducted) but Swiggy is not able to confirm receipt of payment?

I - Yes.

C - Okay, then it’s an integration problem with Paytm that we need to solve. While I’ll get my team on figuring out the integration problem and putting out an app update as soon as we fix it, I would also put out an immediate short term fix so as to get our orders back on track.

The problem here is users don’t know Paytm isn’t working and they’re further disappointed by the fact they can see their money being deducted but the order not going through. As a short term fix, I would consider doing one of the following:

1. I would consider removing the Paytm option from the list of options that the user can choose from. I would do this if it doesn’t cause too much panic/isn’t too much of a surprise to users.

2. I would focus on educating the user that there’s a problem with Paytm payments. I would do this by displaying a banner in the “select payment options page” and putting out social media updates.

Once we fix the Paytm problem and roll that out to users, I would also think that this is not limited to Paytm and could happen with other payment providers in the future too. To solve this for the long term, I would do the following

1. Set up alerts so that all internal teams are notified immediately if payment options are failing. This way, Swiggy can take immediate action.

2. It would be useful for users to see success rates with each payment option displayed right there so that they’re ensured that their payment will go through and food will be on its way without any hiccups!