PAKGrocers — Karachi, Pakistan
Online Grocery Delivery App for PAKGrocers (Karachi)
- iOS · Android · Web · Rider
- Apps shipped
- Karachi
- Cities live
- Laravel · React Native · Redis
- Tech
- Live in production
- Status
Project details
The Challenge
PAKGrocers set out to build a credible online-grocery experience for Karachi — a category in which the local market is dominated by general-purpose delivery apps that treat groceries as an afterthought. The founders had spent enough time watching neighbourhood demand to know there was room for a focused, grocery-first product: real partner-store inventory, real delivery windows, and a rider experience that worked on the device classes Karachi riders actually carry.
The brief was full-stack and end-to-end: a customer-facing experience on iOS, Android and web; a rider application for the delivery fleet; a merchant dashboard for the partner stores fulfilling the orders; payment integrations against the local Pakistani gateways; and real-time order tracking that held together while orders moved through pick, pack, dispatch and delivery. All of it had to be ready for live customer demand on day one — not a demo, a launch.
Our Approach
We led the build end-to-end, from product discovery through architecture, implementation and the post-launch operational tail. The defining design call was that the order is the source of truth — every surface (customer app, rider app, merchant dashboard, ops admin) reads from and writes to the same authoritative order record, with state transitions driven by an explicit order-lifecycle state machine rather than ad-hoc updates.
The customer apps (iOS and Android) are React Native, sharing code with a slimmed-down web experience for users who prefer the browser. The rider app is a separate React Native build tuned for the device profile of the delivery fleet — low memory footprint, aggressive caching of the active route, and offline-tolerant order acceptance so a rider going through a brief connectivity gap doesn't drop an in-flight job. The merchant dashboard is a Laravel + Inertia application that lives on the merchant's existing PC or tablet at the store.
- Customer experience — store discovery, cart, real-time stock from partner inventory, address management with map-pin precision, scheduled and on-demand delivery windows.
- Rider experience — job acceptance, navigation handoff, proof-of-delivery capture, earnings visibility, shift management.
- Merchant dashboard — incoming orders, pick lists, stock-out handling, daily reconciliation, and a clear escalation path for problem orders.
- Real-time tracking — websocket-backed status updates from order placement through to rider arrival, with sane fallbacks for poor connectivity.
- Payments — integration against Pakistani gateways and cash-on-delivery flows, with reconciliation back into the order record.
The inventory layer is the one we spent disproportionate effort on. Grocery is unforgiving — promising a customer a tomato you don't actually have is a bad customer experience that no amount of UI polish recovers. We invested in a partner-store inventory sync that respects the reality that partner-store stock counts are imperfect, with conservative buffers and graceful stock-out handling at the cart and order-confirmation stages.
Stack: Laravel · PHP 8 · React Native · MySQL · Redis · WebSockets, deployed on infrastructure sized for the launch envelope and tuned for the cost profile of the Pakistani delivery margin.
The Outcome
The platform launched live in Karachi with all four surfaces in production: customer iOS, customer Android, customer web, and the rider app, with the merchant dashboard backing the partner-store network. Orders flow end-to-end through the system — placed by the customer, accepted by the merchant, picked and packed at the store, dispatched to the rider, tracked in real time, and reconciled into the order record at delivery.
Our engagement continues post-launch as PAKGrocers refines the experience based on actual customer behaviour, extends the partner-store network, and builds out the operational tooling needed to run a growing delivery business. The platform handles thousands of daily orders and is the system the team builds their growth on.
Capabilities used
Services that powered this project
Next project
Mypromo — Luxembourg