goPuff: Making Convenience More Convenient With Delivery

It’s happened to almost everyone at some point in their lives: They are up in the middle of the night working on a school project/work project/watching over a sick child, when two unfortunate realities become apparent at the same moment. The first is that they desperately need Cheetos, Mountain Dew and beef jerky to keep going. The second is that they have none of those three things in their home.

In the past, the only option was trek out to the nearest 24-hour convenience store and load up on the unhealthy necessities.

But since 2016, goPuff has been working hard to offer a better option: They’ll bring the convenience store to the customer, any time of the day or night.

Founded in 2013 by Yakir Gola and Rafael Ilishayev while both were still students at Drexel University, goPuff doesn’t physically visit convenience stores and bring the offerings to the customer. Rather, it warehouses its wares and delivers them on demand to customers’ doors within 30 minutes of an online or mobile app order.

And they do offer a little bit of everything, just like a standard C-store might. Need batteries, a pregnancy test, a pack of rolling papers, a phone charger, a spatula and two liters of soda – and need them now? goPuff’s got your back: The company stocks all of those items (and more) just in case the need arises in the middle of the night. All in, the firm warehouses over 3,000 products.

To use the service, customers place an order on the goPuff app or on its website. There is a $1.95 flat fee per delivery, which the company promises to have at your door in “less time than it takes to finish the next episode of whichever show you’re binging.” There is no minimum order amount, and pricing is set to be comparable to the local convenience store.

“We’re the people’s delivery service,” Gola said. “Our idea is to really create a totally new kind of retail space – one that is really convenient.”

Because, he noted, the reality is that convenience stores don’t always live up to their name. They might be a convenient stop on the way to or from somewhere, but if the customer is already at home, going back out is the opposite of convenient.

And the products people buy most often are a strong indication of the sort of impulse buys that push C-store purchases, he noted. Ice cream by the pint remains a massive seller: Gola said they have surprisingly become one of Philadelphia’s largest ice cream vendors, almost completely by accident. Pet food is also big.

“The dog is looking at you – you forgot to buy the dog food – and we save people from having to actually cook their dog a meal,” Gola said.

And though Cheetos, soda and candy do solid business on the site, healthy snacks are their fastest-growing sales category. And some of its popular items include things that one might not seek out at a convenience store, like cutlery sets, hookahs, butane torches, emergency contraception pills and bath towels.

The product line has been growing since the 100 or so items they started delivering to fellow students on their college campus, mostly to meet consumer demand. “For the first four months of the business, it was just the two of us making deliveries,” Gola said. “The growth has been astonishing.”

Since the start of 2019, goPuff has opened for business in Nashville, Tennessee; Hartford, Connecticut; Kansas City, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, bringing its total number of served cities above 60 in the U.S. – with “many, many more to come.”