FreshKatch: An online store revolutionizing seafood delivery

FreshKatch is a home-grown online seafood store that has carved a name for itself in the D2C space. Their mission is to deliver fresh and preservative-free seafood to the customer’s doorstep, straight from the fishermen’s catch.

FreshKatch was born during the pandemic times when there was a pressing need among customers to buy high-quality food without stepping out of their homes. Also, the burgeoning gap between the demand and the supply of fresh seafood during theses times was met by FreshKatch.

Serving ‘modern customers’ the ‘modern way’: Being app ready from the start

FreshKatch has always known the importance of apps in this digital age. They knew it was the most effective (and the easiest way) to reach all their target audience in a short span. They also knew about the huge volume of business it could bring to their table.

Like every other home-delivery business, FreshKatch was an ops-heavy firm. In other words, the founder and his team had very little time to focus on the development of the website and mobile app.

So, they decided to kick-start their app-building journey by partnering with a small agency. Their demands were quite straightforward - a user-friendly mobile app along with a dynamic website that will help them reach their customers.

But things did not turn out as planned.

Stumbling Blocks In Their App-building Journey

By deciding to build a customized app from scratch, FreshKatch did not sign up for the following hurdles in their efforts-

• High cost of development

Building an app is never easy on the purse, especially when it is custom-built from scratch. The number of resources needed to design, build, and maintain a highly dynamic eCommerce app like FreshKatch turned out to be enormous.

End Result : The FreshKatch team had to break the bank to foot the development and maintenance costs.

• Complex Change Management

When you outsource development, change management issues are bound to crop up. The FreshKatch team was aware of this, but never expected the delay that would accompany even a small change in the app. Their dependency on the agency even for a trivial thing like running an ad was alarming.

To make matters worse, there were a lot of communication errors(resulting in bugs) and substantial duplication of efforts between the app and the website, all of which were charged separately by the agency.

End Result : The constant back-and-forth change-related communication(read: miscommunication) resulted in the app taking more than 5 months to see daylight.

• No Visibility

FreshKatch wanted to improve their app adoption rates and were spending heavily on ads. However, their efforts were not supported by the newly built app as it was not integrated with any analytics platform. This resulted in zero visibility around ad performance, and the FreshKatch team had great difficulties in optimizing and scaling up the ads.

End Result : The FreshKatch had to put their ads on hold as it wasn't showing any signs of breaking even.

• Frequent App crashes

During the first few months of launching their custom-built app, FreshKatch was able to see 95-98% of their sales coming from their app. Even though this was a news to cherish, their happiness was short-lived due to the app’s frequent crashes. Customer experience was taking a hit, and the agency failed to solve the issues on time.

End Result : The FreshKatch team was losing customers faster than they were attracting new ones.

How Vajro propelled FreshKatch ahead

In early 2021, FreshKatch started hearing about us, and our unique low-code/no-code app building platform that was helping hundreds of businesses in the Shopify ecosystem. When they approached us for a solution, we recommended the Shopify ecosystem to run their online business.

FreshKatch instantly switched to Shopify through an agency partner, and we onboarded them into Vajro. Within a matter of a few days, their mobile app was launched that was perfected to their exact requirements. This was a real breather for them after the bad experience with custom app development.

Here are the different solutions offered by Vajro:

• Integration with Google Firebase and Facebook

For any business, data is the key to scaling up. FreshKatch’s perennial need for data and rich insights to optimize their marketing efforts was met by integrating Vajro with Google Firebase and Facebook. They revived all their ad campaigns which were previously put on hold due to the lack of integrations.

• Integration with In-Store Pickup Local Delivery

Delivering on time with accuracy is the most basic requirement for a home delivery business. The plug-n-play integration of Vajro with “InStore Pickup Local Delivery” ensured that there were zero errors in delivery, and all the changes on the website were automatically reflected in the app instantly.

• Push notifications

Thanks to Vajro’s automated push notifications capabilities, FreshKatch was able to communicate all their product announcements, discounts, new arrivals, etc. to their customers without any hassle. FreshKatch also smartly leveraged Vajro’s rich media notification feature in which pictures, videos, and GIFs could be attached to the notifications. This greatly boosted their download-customer conversions.

One small step, a huge leap in metrics

FreshKatch made a soft launch of their app in February 2021. They drove app adoption through referrals, word of mouth, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

Within the first 3 months of launch, FreshKatch was able to break even and started experiencing exponential growth. Here’s what they achieved in terms of raw numbers:

• Increase in Overall Revenue by over 151%
• Increase in Returning Customers by 33%
• Increase in Order Volume by 139%
• 243% improvement in overall business thanks to marketing underpinned by Firebase and Facebook integrations

Final Result : Around 10,000 app visitors every month and 2.95% more conversions through the app.

A Hypermetropic Vision: What the future holds

FreshKatch’s ad performance has started going through the roof. Customers are poruing in from all directions.

The successful app adoption by the customers has now encouraged FreshKatch to think about scaling and expanding their business even further. They have now ventured into Pickles and are planning to sell raw fresh honey too.

On the marketing side, FreshKatch plans to drive deeper collaborations with food bloggers on social media and plan on introducing subscriptions and loyalty programs to improve customer lifetime value.

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