Want to make a large order? Grab can now split the delivery across multiple drivers

Shin Yi Low, Lead Product Manager, Online Delivery, Reliability

. December 12, 2024 . Regional

During holiday seasons, Grab tends to see more large orders than usual.

Think of office workers making a bulk order on GrabFood for their year-end gathering, or a family stocking up on groceries through GrabMart to cook a festive meal at home.

Larger orders are undoubtedly good for our merchant-partners’ business, but they can be challenging for our delivery-partners.

Many of our GrabFood and GrabMart deliveries are fulfilled by driver-partners on two-wheelers. In some of our Southeast Asian markets—for example in Thailand and Vietnam—we don’t offer car-based on-demand delivery at all.

If an order is too bulky for the delivery-partner to carry it to its destination safely, they may have to cancel it. That could mean less business for merchants, unsatisfied customers, and, in some cases, food wastage if the order has already been prepared.

Given these challenges, we decided to improve the large order experience to make these kinds of deliveries more reliable. We’ll now split bulky orders across two delivery-partners when necessary, at no extra cost to the person who ordered it.

Splitting up the load

Our team at Grab has implemented two solutions to handle large orders more effectively.

System-initiated splits: In the first, Grab flags an incoming order as a large order. We use a Large Language Model (LLM) to assess the order based on various factors, including the number of items, item types, item value and their weight.

If our model finds this order qualifies as a large order that’s too bulky for one delivery person to handle on a two-wheeler, the system will first try to allocate a four-wheeler to this delivery. In case there are no four-wheelers around, the large order will be split in two and assigned to two separate motorbike delivery-partners.

The merchant-partners will receive the incoming order already split into two parts, so that they’re aware of this while preparing and packing. From the point-of-view of delivery-partners, it’s just a regular delivery, as they get assigned one part of the order which they can handle by themselves. The customer receives both orders within a short period of time, as both delivery-drivers are dispatched at roughly the same time.

Driver-initiated splits: In case a delivery-partner decides they can’t take on a delivery by themselves, but Grab’s system hasn’t flagged it as a large order, delivery-partners can also initiate the split order and request for another delivery-partner to carry part of the load.

Iterating and improving

Driver-initiated order splitting has been available since 2023. In April this year, we introduced Grab-initiated split orders to improve the experience and reduce delivery times.

For GrabFood deliveries, Grab-initiated order splitting has been rolled out in all of our markets. For GrabMart, it’s still limited to some markets. In both cases, we only apply the split delivery approach to large orders that have been paid for cashlessly, and that are booked for instant delivery.

We already observe an increased fulfillment rate for large orders since introducing this feature.

Our next steps are to scale the feature to all markets, and solve for handling the complexities of cash payments and scheduled deliveries for split orders.

We have also been working on fine-tuning our large order detection algorithm, which goes beyond just assessing the weight or number of items. We are training our AI models to make them more accurate and predictive, and to consider more factors such as input from merchants, among others, to arrive at a more accurate large order probability score.

Once we’ve established reliable fulfillment for a variety of large orders, we’ll focus on helping more merchant-partners understand how to make the most of this feature. Serving higher-value, large orders, will also benefit their business—and our delivery-partners get more jobs.

At Grab, we’re always looking for ways to make the platform experience more delightful and seamless. Large order splitting is just one example of how we implement solutions to address real-life challenges.

Deliveries and rides

Want to make a large order? Grab can now split the delivery across multiple drivers

Splitting up the load

Iterating and improving

Komsan Chiyadis

Komsan Chiyadis