Flowwow Courier App

Main article: Mobile applications

2022: Ability to receive exclusive orders

The marketplace of local stores Flowwow on October 4, 2022 announced the update of the application for couriers. In the updated version, the algorithm selects the most suitable employee for each delivery and sends him an exclusive offer to accept the order. The courier has about half a minute to agree or refuse: he can be sure that the order for this time is offered only to him. This approach allows Flowwow to focus the courier's attention on the delivery that suits him most and give time to make a decision.

The application for couriers Flowwow has been operating since 2019 and as of October 2022 is available to Android users in a number of Russian cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg. In it, couriers can accept orders, use a city map and plan delivery times, receive information about the product and the wishes of the customer, as well as contact the recipient. Previously, the new order notification system was not able to confirm that a specific notification had reached the courier terminal. In addition, the difficulty was that information about the location of couriers could be distorted due to the imperfection of cellular communications and this affected the prioritization when distributing notification of a new order.

Flowwow developers collected feedback from couriers and did a lot of work to update the application. The main change is the appearance of the Order Quotation function. Now the algorithm generates a notification about a new order and sends it to the courier terminal. As soon as the terminal receives a notification, it clarifies with the server whether the offer is relevant, and only then notifies the employee of the order and starts the countdown timer. If the courier terminal for some reason is not online or cannot receive a notification, the system passes it and proceeds to the next courier on the list. At the time for which the courier must accept or reject the order, he can be sure that no one else will receive the notification. This reduces the search time for the performer, which, in turn, is beneficial for the client. In addition, the system now warns the courier that you should not accept the order and later refuse it. If the failure rate is high, the system will automatically exclude such a courier from the notification queue by the end of the day.

This change improves understanding of what it takes to accept an order by our couriers. Now we know exactly who and at what time could not accept the order. If the failure is repeated several times in the same time period, the system remembers this to offer the employee a more convenient time in the future. That is, now we can analyze in detail how couriers behave, what their priorities are - and use the data obtained to further improve the process of finding the most convenient courier for customers and the most convenient order for our couriers, "said Andrey Boyarchuk, backend developer of the local store marketplace Flowwow.

The team also made design changes: in particular, unloaded the interface to make it more convenient for couriers to perceive information. All order management is displayed with a city map. And the modal window with an order offer now occupies no more than 40-45% of the screen with a map, which also displays two points: where to pick up and where to deliver the order.

In the future, the Flowwow team plans to improve the application based on understanding the work of couriers and prioritizing their search based on rating, distance and other parameters. More flexible algorithms will enable customers to receive high quality delivery on time, and couriers will receive a stable income and an obvious order assignment system.