- New Year’s Eve is a landmark day for online food delivery services and its prominence is increasing every year – from roughly 5 million orders on New Year’s Eve 2021, the same for 2022 was 5.5 million. 2023 was the best-ever New Year’s Eve for online food delivery services with 6.5 million orders
- Consumers kept on ordering in high volumes throughout the day on New Year’s Eve 2023 with the spike peaking for dinners and late-night orders, where the GMV delivered was 2.5-3x of other days of the year
- Given the super-normal demand, platforms were able to step up to provide superior customer experience on the day with customers across city tiers expressing high satisfaction with food quality, packaging, delivery time, and in-app discounts in Redseer’s Consumer Panel analysis
Every year, there are several celebratory occasions where online food delivery has become an integral part of the experience. Examples of these days are major holidays like Diwali, Holi, important cricket matches like in the IPL, Cricket World Cups etc. Online food delivery platforms witness major demand jump on these days. These spike days are not only important for these platforms from a business perspective, it’s also important for these platforms to provide customers with good experiences despite the significantly higher load on the system. There are up to 20 days in a year where online food delivery platforms witness significant jumps in order volumes. But the most significant of those spike days is 31st Dec or the New Year’s Eve (NYE), which witnesses by far the largest spike in orders in any given days of the year.
New Year’s Eve 2023 (NYE23) proved to be eventful for India’s food delivery platforms as the gross orders made during the day was a record number of 6.5 million, which is 18% higher in comparison to NYE22. NYE22 itself was massive wherein a total of 5.5 million orders were placed, compared to 5 million orders in NYE21. Every NYE, consumers are increasingly ordering food online and that has become a sort of integral part of the New Year celebrations.
Redseer’s Big Data analysis on Consumer Behaviour notes that the spike in food delivery orders on NYE23 was a nationwide phenomenon as Metros, Tier-1 cities and rest of Indian cities exhibited almost similar growth in order volumes on this day. As platforms battled it out to deliver significantly large volumes of food orders, customers across city tiers reported overwhelmingly positive experiences to show their appreciation for early delivery, impressive discounts, good quality food and customised (for the day) packaging despite every hour of the day being a peak hour of sorts.
The day started with GMV in breakfast (orders placed between 6am to 11am) being 1.5-2x the daily average of the year. GMV peaked in the dinner and late-night orders, being 2.5-3x the average of other days.
Redseer’s Big data analysis also observes that on NYE23, customers not only ordered higher volumes, but they also spent more per order. Redseer estimates that the average order value was up to 30% higher than that of other days of the year. This was driven by people coming together and ordering to celebrate New Year’s Eve and the increasing prominence of desserts ordered in the day. Another dimension to premiumization was people ordering from premium restaurants to treat themselves on the day.
NYE is a day where consumers need these platforms to make their celebrations more fulfilling and that translates to materially higher orders and higher spends per order for the platforms. Hence, online food delivery platforms and brands do their best to serve their customers on this day.
Abhijit Routray, Associate Partner at Redseer remarked on the above developments “Spike days like the IPL, Cricket World Cups, Diwali, NYE etc. are critical for online food delivery services as customers order more and spend more. It is also important for the brands and platforms to be able to serve the increased load on these days as customer experience cannot be hampered on these celebratory occasions. It was heartening to see the jubilation in the ecosystem on NYE23 with record number of orders being delivered, while customers reported high satisfaction with the services. More importantly, the fact that the momentum was seen across India and across city tiers was testament to the size of the opportunity in India.”
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