Rappi's Multi-Category Retention Engine
Sebastian Mejia, co-founder of Rappi, on building for multi-verticality in on-demand
Rappi’s early move into many categories was really a retention engine disguised as product expansion. The app started with food and an order anything input, then used what people kept asking for to add groceries, pharmacy, ecommerce, travel, and payments into one home screen. That matters because the same courier network, merchant base, and app traffic can serve more purchase occasions, which raises order frequency, spreads delivery costs across more orders, and makes the app harder to replace.
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The clearest proof is behavior over time. More than 90% of Rappi customers buy from at least two categories, and average monthly purchase frequency rises from 2 times in year 1 to 6 times in year 3 and 11 times in year 5. Multi category breadth turns a one off meal app into a daily errands app.
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This is also an operations play. In delivery, profits improve when one rider can stay busy and stack nearby orders. Rappi’s broader assortment increases the odds that the network has demand at more hours of the day, and across more basket types, which supports higher drop density and lower cost per delivery.
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Compared with peers, the contrast is concrete. Instacart built grocery on top of existing store infrastructure, then added high margin ads and software. Swiggy used its food fleet to extend into groceries and local commerce. Rappi pushed furthest toward a Latin American super app, with travel and payments living inside the same app as delivery.
The next phase is turning category breadth into a denser local network and a richer merchant product. As more orders flow through one app, Rappi can sell merchants not just demand, but ads, payments, and logistics, while training customers to open Rappi for many small needs each week instead of one restaurant order now and then.