Ever heard about on-demand laundry apps and how can they bring peace to the day to day life? Well, today  human life is all about ease and it has been possible due to the presence of certain on-demand mobile apps. These mobile apps have contributed towards the ease of human life and growth of even small businesses like laundry, salons, barber shops, food outlets, etc. Whether be it buying grocery or booking travelling tickets,these on-demand apps just takes seconds to assign the job to the right person who finishes up the work. Laundry apps are also apart of these apps now. These apps provide several benefits to their customers as the customers receive the washed and dry-cleaned clothes at their doorstop. Also, the clothes are collected for washing by the people associated with the app. So, all in all its just the labour of few clicks for the customer.

Laundry Business And on-demand Laundry Mobile Apps

Well,looking over the laundry business, which has been prevailing from a very long time now with on-demand for enhancing the current market, several value-added services such as pickup and drop have been introduced. These apps maintain laundry services by hiring delivery professionals and involves partnership with the local washermen. Also, hiring of skilled labour is done for washing and dry cleaning the clothes.

According to a report by Euromonitor International the laundry industry in India is worth 200,000 crore annually. While it is observed that only the 5% of the total market is organised and the rest of the market is still unexplored. The online consumers are expected to increase by 20% adding up almost 12 million new customers.                            

The laundry sector,and especially on-demand laundry app development is mentioned among the top 10 business ideas by the business books as the sector requires nominal capital, no-entry barriers, the market is huge these all adds up to make the sector among the top in the list.

However, There Are Several Challenges Which Are Faced By The on-demand Laundry Apps

Less skilled labour

The sector is mainly dependent on skilled labours. There may be software and machinery involved but at the end of the day dependency on the manual work cannot be eliminated. The industry is trying to overcome this problem by providing fair wages to the labourers as most of the work is done by them. And that too labourers will not be interested to work if they are not paid more than what they can earn on their own which leads to the shortage of the labourers in the sector.

Sector with lower margin business

Most of the customers want to get their laundry delivered at home. However, no one wants to pay any extra penny for it. So, the main challenge for the sector is to find out the sustainable customers who can pay some increased price. The margin in the business is not too much and these little increments are necessary for the survival of the sector and the people involved in it.

Experiences of the customers

A lot of steps are there in laundry process where humans are involved. Along with that the customer has quite high expectations but there is also greater risk of some mis happening as the process is not completely automatic. Therefore, it is a great challenge to customise the experience of the customer.

Establishment in the market

The sector is already dominated by already existing dhobis and dry cleaners etc. So there must be some policies that must attract the skilled labours towards the on-demand laundry platform as attracting these skilled labours will be the biggest milestone for establishment of the on-demand platform in the market. Also the customers needs to be attracted too this can be done by several discount policies which will certainly attract the customers .

High risk and reward ratio

This can be explained with the help of a simple example. Suppose an order is received for 50 shirts charged 50 rupees each which makes the total profit of 2500 . Suppose a single shirt out of them gets damaged and cost 2500 then that amount has to be paid to the customer thus a single shirt can led to losing all the profit that could have been made by the on-demand platform.

Retention of the customer

The sector provides  a lot of options to the customers. The customer can go for both online as well as offline options for themselves. Thus with all these options it is quite challenging to intact the customer and low customer loyalty sum up to lower customer retention.

Logistics

There are several problems associated with the logistics such as-

• The customer might not be available at home therefore the pickup or the delivery may not take place.
• The customer sometimes due to some barriers might not get the delivery on the expected time slot.
• Fake orders is another major problem.
• Problems can be faced regarding locating the address of the customer.

Backend challenges

It is not possible to satisfy each and every customer out of every 50 there will be at least one unsatisfied customer. However, with several discounts and offers the customers can be attracted but the major challenge is retaining them.

While the actual operations are done at backend by skilled labour which are quite hard to attract and retain as well. The balance is very necessary between the growing customers rate and the skilled labours else it will certainly affect the on-demand service in a negative way.

What’s next for these apps

Thus, though the sector is promising it got several challenges to overcome to establish itself in the market but certainly the sector got big business and with proper business techniques huge profit can be made out of it. And it will boost the economy of the people involved in it as well.