E-commerce player Flipkart has decided to give online grocery delivery another try. According to this Business Standard report, the company has launched a grocery delivery service in Bangalore on a pilot basis. The report quotes Anil Goteti, head of marketplace at Flipkart as saying that more pilots of the service would be extended to other cities soon; he did not provide a timeline for a public launch. MediaNama has written Flipkart seeking more details about its grocery delivery pilot and will up the story once they respond. This is Flipkart’s second pilot test in the grocery deliver space. It had shut down its earlier service Flipkart Nearby in February last year, nearly 5 months after its launch. The company had launched the service in October 2015 on a pilot basis, when the company delivered to the Bangalore neighborhoods of Koramangala, HSR Layout, BTM Layout, Ejipura, Jayanagar, JP Nagar, and Bellandur. While shutting it down, a Flipkart spokesperson said the pilot ran its course and that it was run to understand efficiencies and operations of the hyper local business. The spokesperson added that “the learnings from this pilot will now be used for future operations of the company.” Amazon’s online grocery services It isn’t clear whether Flipkart will have an offline model for its grocery service, like its rival Amazon, but the latter has been investing heavily into India lately. Amazon recently received government of India’s approval to invest $500 million in the food retail segment. In April this year, the Department of Industrial Policy and…
