Namba Food is a unique food delivery service that combines speed, convenience, and simplicity.
Being first is hard. The story of Namba Food is a story about success that took a global idea and successfully localized and integrated it into Kyrgyzstan’s daily lives. Since 2013 the company has been on a mission to bring value to both vendors and customers by conveniently delivering goods at the right time.
Namba Food business model offers a range of services including personal courier service and even turnkey solution:
- Delivery of food and goods as a service (+additional services such as “Personal courier”);
- Mini white label (a shop or cafe can have their own branded page for delivery with service rendered by Namba Food);
- Full white-label (another brand is created, Namba Food is cloned).
The success came after serious battles with business obstacles and challenges. Although the niche for food delivery in the region was empty; still, the Namba Food team had to adapt and adjust to the rules of the game to ensure long-term prosperity. For example, Namba Food founders hired a crew of phone operators to make phone calls as the market required orders to be confirmed by a human being. From small decisions to big ones, Namba Food is a real example of globalization.
High-Level System Overview
Namba Food is more than a delivery service website. With a partial vertical integration, it covers the entire cycle of ordering goods online. Thus, an advanced set of software and hardware was required to maintain flawless work for all stakeholders, including end-users, couriers, team operators, cafes’ and store managers.
Moreover, Namba Food’s API helps third-party suppliers to integrate with their systems and include delivery to their services.
Typical usage scenarios & user roles
Namba Food involves several user journeys for different roles. Each user journey required different sets of functionalities and user interfaces.
- Website and Client mobile applications for making orders.
- Manager control panel for proceeding with orders.
- Operator panel and Courier mobile app for assigning the orders to couriers and tracking them.
- Admin Panel for checking the reports and stats, and managing all the staff.
Web-Version & Mobile Application for End-Users (Android and iOS)
Namba Food is not a simple catalog of goods and services as it aims to seamlessly blend into the modern, busy lifestyle of its customers. It was required to develop a convenient process for ordering products and make it stress-free.
Namba Food meticulously studied users’ behavior and collected feedback to find the perfect market-fit.
The ordering process is simple:
- Users go to the website and choose cafes and shops (Also, orders can be placed via phone or live chat).
- Users save the products to the cart and checkout.
- The users receive a call from an operator to confirm the order or can choose “no calls” checkbox.
- Courier delivers the order in a pre-estimated time.
Mobile Application for Couriers (Android)
Android app for couriers enables them to receive new orders, assigned to them by operators via the control panel. After a courier is assigned to the order, their app receives a push notification and displays the order pick-up location. Having received the notification, the courier goes to pick up the order from a cafe or a shop and heads to the client. The courier can get paid directly in cash or via the local payment system.
Control Panel Functionality
Control panel for operators and managers enables them to receive orders, manage items that were ordered from a shop or restaurant, and download reports. Such a panel brings organization to overviewing orders’ statuses, by enabling operators to make required corrections, and even cancel orders if necessary.
The control panel also displays customer reviews and helps Namba Food to improve its service based on the feedback it gets from real-world users.
Order Assignment and Reporting Functionality
The Swift intellectual system allows operators to assign couriers to orders taking into consideration the following factors:
- Location of a courier, a cafe/restaurant, and end-user.
- The courier’s number of orders delivered during the current shift and in the last 3 hours.
- The system considers the location of the end-user too to suggest couriers, who are already carrying the order but will be done with the current order staying close to the next order’s initial destination.
For navigation purposes, Mad Devs used one of our previously developed pet projects, Ariadna, an open-source geocoder. With the help of Ariadna geocoder, Namba Food’s automatic order assignment functionality allows operators to handle more orders during peak hours.
This admin panel helps a manager to stay in touch with a courier if there is an issue on the way:
- Track the couriers’ locations on a map.
- Track the date of the order.
- Check how many orders have been delivered by a particular courier.
- Make corrections or add notes in the end-user address.
- Add notes for couriers (for example, when end users don’t want to receive calls from couriers.)
The built-in reporting functionality enables managers to get full control over the entire delivery system. In the manager’s panel, they can configure discounts, send news and notifications to end-users, set working days and hours for cafes, add new meal offerings, and do many other things enabling them to deliver users the best possible experience.
The Swift admin panel displays orders by statuses as a diagram, which you can see below. It helps the management team to track the number of orders delivered and canceled.
Monitoring service
To monitor the stability of Namba Food software, Mad Devs has integrated Grafana. It allows our developers to keep track of services in Docker containers. Grafana shows how the load in the project is balanced, including disk space consumed, memory allocated, swap, load, container uptime, and other parameters.
Monitoring also helps us to prevent service timeouts. When the load grows, we can track spikes, estimate the severity of an issue, and quickly resolve it.
Technologies used for the Namba Food project
Website and Mobile Apps Infrastructure Scheme
A local hosting provider is used for hosting the infrastructure. When a system gets a response from the client, it is handled by the Nginx proxy. When the Mad Devs team is deploying a new version, we use the Nginx gen server. The Nginx proxy sends requests to the website, which is in its turn connected to the MySQL database, and Redis serves as an in-memory key-value database.
All our services run in Docker containers, which simplifies the process of infrastructure maintenance and monitoring.
Working with Pipelines
We at Mad Devs widely use pipelines. The pipeline for the NambaFood system is displayed below:
The deployment stage has been automated for the staging server, and deployment on the production server is done manually.
How Many People Work on the Project?
There are currently three members in a core development team. During the pre-launch phase, a larger team had been working on the Namba Food project. Five full-timers and two part-timers were working closely with the customer on the project:
We have weekly calls with the customer’s business representatives and monthly meetings to see what can be improved from a development/IT viewpoint. Our staff members also work on Namba Food premises several days a week to keep in touch with the customer’s employees. This keeps everyone on the same page. We can collect the very recent business requirements and quickly respond to changes that a highly competitive delivery market may throw at us.
Nationwide Success and Day to Day Improvements
Launched in 2013, Namba Food became a fully self-supported service in just two years. Due to Namba Foods’ vision and understanding of its target audience, together, we were able to build a product that truly solves customers’ problems. The year-over-year growth rate is truly impressive. As the number of businesses using Namba Food delivery is growing every week, the service’s yearly growth rate is about 50% for both revenue and deliveries made.
In 2017 Namba Food won a prestigious all-country award for the Best Online Service in Kyrgyzstan at the KIT forum.
Turnkey Solution
Today Namba Food is a turnkey solution for creating delivery service in any part of the world. In fact, they offer training, consultation, and launch from $7000!
Our job as an engineering partner is to make sure that software goes along with Namba Food’s rapid growth and scale the solution to fit its full and mini white label leasing pricing model.
In 2019 Namba Food founders leased its software to the OshFood team. Namba Food provided training, consultation to launch a similar delivery service in Osh, Kyrgyzstan successfully. Now it works autonomously under a separate brand, and we expect more “full white label” partners to be onboarded in the next few years. Namba Food is ready to help in developing a delivery service in any country in the world! Find more details in the link.
Throughout the years of collaboration, we are honored and pleased to be Namba Food’s engineering partner. As users ourselves, we personally invested in the project and are happy to see our humble impact on Namba Food’s success.
Previously published here.
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