Delivery notifications

The number of delivery notifications you get nowadays, every time you order from ecommerce, is insane. And I don't see it improving

Now that it’s been much more than six months since I left Delhivery (my official last date there was 7th December 2023), I’m officially not an “insider”, and so I can write about these things.

Like most 1%er Indians, I shop a lot on e-commerce. Apart from Amazon and Swiggy Instamart, I buy a lot from direct to consumer websites. A lot of coffee. Some chocolate. Some protein powder. Some clothes. Other sundry items.

Many of these D2C websites use a “dabbil dabbi” service called ShipRocket to send their stuff. ShipRocket (also known as KartRocket) is a delivery aggregator - they negotiate cheap bulk rates with all courier companies (including Delhivery) and present a “marketplace solution” to the D2C companies.

The value added by the likes of ShipRocket (this is already a competitive space now with many other such dabbil-dabbi companies) is “smart routing” - they know things like which companies are faring well in which parts of the country, and can thus route smartly. Anyway I won’t comment further here since most of my opinion on this is as a former employee of Delhivery.

What I want to write about is the “death by notification” that happens because of the multiple layers involved. You get multiple messages from the e-commerce company at different stages of the package’s shipping. You get the same (or even more) messages from ShipRocket - and you get each such message three times (once by SMS, once by WhatsApp and once by email). And then the courier company similarly sends out messages.

Like this was five minutes ago (and I’ve muted ShipRocket on WhatsApp, and the emails go into a folder):

Four messages. For one packet of coffee powder! And here, the coffee beans comapny is not sending any messages! This was another such case two weeks ago.

It is painful. I don’t know why so many people need to send so many messages. At least companies like Delhivery are publicly traded, which means cost is a consideration, and that limits the number of messages / emails sent. But a VC-money-burning company like ShipRocket has no such constraints, and it keeps firing away.

And for someone who has to “unbold” all messages (mark them as read) this is a real pain!