Weeks after Uber exited India’s food delivery market, conceding defeat to local giants Swiggy and Zomato, a new player is gearing up to challenge the heavily-backed duopoly: Amazon.
The e-commerce giant plans to enter the Indian food delivery market in the coming weeks, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The launch of the service, which would be offered as part of Amazon’s Prime Now platform, could happen as soon as next month, we are told.
In the run up to the launch, the e-commerce giant has been testing its food delivery service with select restaurant partners in Bangalore, the source said, requesting anonymity as details of the new business are still private.
The company has been working on its food delivery business for several quarters and was previously aiming to launch it during the festival of Diwali. It’s unclear what caused the delay.
TechCrunch could not ascertain the kind of business agreement Amazon has formed with Indian restaurant partners — many of which have grown frustrated with online food delivery players. An Amazon spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
Amazon’s foray into the food delivery market would create new challenges for Prosus Ventures-backed Swiggy, and Zomato, a 10-year-old startup that acquired Uber’s Eats business in India for about $180 million in January.
Both the startups, having raised more than $2 billion together, are still not profitable, losing more than $15 million each month to acquire new customers and sustain existing ones.
Anand Lunia, a VC at India Quotient, said in a recent podcast that the food delivery firms have little choice but to keep subsidizing the cost of food items on their platform as otherwise most of their customers can’t afford them.
Figuring out a path to profitability is especially challenging in India as unlike in the developed markets such as the U.S., where the value of each delivery item is about $33; in India, a similar item carries the price tag of $4, according to estimates by Bangalore-based research firm RedSeer.
In recent years, both Swiggy and Zomato have expanded beyond food delivery businesses. Swiggy today runs what it claims to be the largest cloud kitchen network in India, and has also expanded to delivery of just about any item (not just food). Zomato has been working on “Project Kisan,” to procure raw material directly from farmers and fishermen in an attempt to assume control of the supply of items to restaurants.
That’s not to say that it would be very easy for Amazon to scale its food delivery business in India. Swiggy alone operates in more than 520 cities in India and maintains partnership with over 160,000 partners.
Swiggy is adding 10,000 new partners to its platform each month, it said last week on the sidelines of its latest fundraise announcement. At stake is India’s food delivery market that was worth $4.2 billion as of the end of last year, according to RedSeer.
Amazon has established a dense delivery network in India through its own logistics chain and also through partnership with thousands of neighborhood stores.
The company’s move comes as Flipkart, its chief rival in India, is foraying into food retail business. Flipkart, which sold a majority stake in the company to Walmart for $16 billion last year, has registered an entity called “Flipkart Farmermart Pvt Ltd” that will focus on food retail, said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Flipkart Group CEO, in a statement to TechCrunch in October.
The extended business for the Indian firm represents “an important part of our efforts to boost Indian agriculture as well as food processing industry in the country,” he said, adding that the company is already working with hundreds of thousands of small farmers for the business. Flipkart has already committed $258 million to the new venture. Last month, it piloted delivery of fresh fruits and vegetable, Indian newspaper Economic Times reported.
This is not that blog post. I'm saying let's say you were.
This is not a knock any other blog posts out there about Dark Mode. There are lots of good ones, and I'm a fan of any information-sharing blog post. This is more of a thought exercise on what I think it would take to write a really great blog post on this subject.
background-color and color. The other demo(s) will deal with more complex and real-world scenarios. What do you do with images and background images? SVG strokes and fills? Buttons? Borders? Shadows? These are rare things that sites have, so anyone looking at designing a Dark Mode UI will come across them.localStorage, but that can have problems, like the fact that CSS is generally applied to a page before JavaScript executes, meaning you're facing a "flash of incorrect theme" situation. You might be needing to deal with cookies so that you can send theme-specific CSS on each page load.That was all about Dark Mode, but I bet you could imagine how considering all these points could benefit any blog post covering a technical concept.
The post Let’s Say You Were Going to Write a Blog Post About Dark Mode appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Nice demo from Sebastiano Guerriero. When a fixed-position header moves from overlapping differently-colored backgrounds, the colors flop out to be appropriate for that background. Sebastiano's technique is very clever, involving multiple copies of the header within each section (where the copies are hidden from screenreaders) which are all positioned on top of each other and then revealed as the new section comes, thanks to each section having a clip-path around it.
A bonafide CSS trick if I've ever seen one.
It makes me wish there was an easier way of doing it. Like, what if there was some magical value of mix-blend-mode that would handle it? I got close enough that it gives me hope.
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Earlier this year, I came across this demo by Florin Pop, which makes a line go either over or under the letters of a single line heading. I thought this was a cool idea, but there were a few little things about the implementation I felt I could simplify and improve at the same time.
First off, the original demo duplicates the headline text, which I knew could be easily avoided. Then there's the fact that the length of the line going through the text is a magic number, which is not a very flexible approach. And finally, can't we get rid of the JavaScript?
So let's take a look into where I ended up taking this.
Florin puts the text into a heading element and then duplicates this heading, using Splitting.js to replace the text content of the duplicated heading with spans, each containing one letter of the original text.
Already having decided to do this without text duplication, using a library to split the text into characters and then put each into a span feels a bit like overkill, so we're doing it all with an HTML preprocessor.
- let text = 'We Love to Play';
- let arr = text.split('');
h1(role='image' aria-label=text)
- arr.forEach(letter => {
span.letter #{letter}
- });Since splitting text into multiple elements may not work nicely with screen readers, we've given the whole thing a role of image and an aria-label.
This generates the following HTML:
<h1 role="image" aria-label="We Love to Play">
<span class="letter">W</span>
<span class="letter">e</span>
<span class="letter"> </span>
<span class="letter">L</span>
<span class="letter">o</span>
<span class="letter">v</span>
<span class="letter">e</span>
<span class="letter"> </span>
<span class="letter">t</span>
<span class="letter">o</span>
<span class="letter"> </span>
<span class="letter">P</span>
<span class="letter">l</span>
<span class="letter">a</span>
<span class="letter">y</span>
</h1>We place the heading in the middle of its parent (the body in this case) by using a grid layout:
body {
display: grid;
place-content: center;
}
width, but is instead placed in the middle.We may also add some prettifying touches, like a nice font or a background on the container.
Next, we create the line with an absolutely positioned ::after pseudo-element of thickness (height) $h:
$h: .125em;
$r: .5*$h;
h1 {
position: relative;
&::after {
position: absolute;
top: calc(50% - #{$r}); right: 0;
height: $h;
border-radius: 0 $r $r 0;
background: crimson;
}
}The above code takes care of the positioning and height of the pseudo-element, but what about the width? How do we make it stretch from the left edge of the viewport to the right edge of the heading text?
Well, since we have a grid layout where the heading is middle-aligned horizontally, this means that the vertical midline of the viewport coincides with that of the heading, splitting both into two equal-width halves:
Consequently, the distance between the left edge of the viewport and the right edge of the heading is half the viewport width (50vw) plus half the heading width, which can be expressed as a % value when used in the computation of its pseudo-element's width.
So the width of our ::after pseudo-element is:
width: calc(50vw + 50%);So far, the result is just a crimson line crossing some black text:
What we want is for some of the letters to show up on top of the line. In order to get this effect, we give them (or we don't give them) a class of .over at random. This means slightly altering the Pug code:
- let text = 'We Love to Play';
- let arr = text.split('');
h1(role='image' aria-label=text)
- arr.forEach(letter => {
span.letter(class=Math.random() > .5 ? 'over' : null) #{letter}
- });We then relatively position the letters with a class of .over and give them a positive z-index.
.over {
position: relative;
z-index: 1;
}My initial idea involved using translatez(1px) instead of z-index: 1, but then it hit me that using z-index has both better browser support and involves less effort.
The line passes over some letters, but underneath others:
Now that we got over the tricky part, we can also add in an animation to make the line enter in. This means having the crimson line shift to the left (in the negative direction of the x-axis, so the sign will be minus) by its full width (100%) at the beginning, only to then allow it to go back to its normal position.
@keyframes slide { 0% { transform: translate(-100%); } }I opted to have a bit of time to breathe before the start of the animation. This meant adding in the 1s delay which, in turn, meant adding the backwards keyword for the animation-fill-mode, so that the line would stay in the state specified by the 0% keyframe before the start of the animation:
animation: slide 2s ease-out 1s backwards;Doing this gave me another idea, which was to make the line go through every single letter, that is, start above the letter, go through it and finish underneath (or the other way around).
This requires real 3D and a few small tweaks.
First off, we set transform-style to preserve-3d on the heading since we want all its children (and pseudo-elements) to a be part of the same 3D assembly, which will make them be ordered and intersect according to how they're positioned in 3D.
Next, we want to rotate each letter around its y-axis, with the direction of rotation depending on the presence of the randomly assigned class (whose name we change to .rev from "reverse" as "over" isn't really suggestive of what we're doing here anymore).
However, before we do this, we need to remember our span elements are still inline ones at this point and setting a transform on an inline element has absolutely no effect.
To get around this issue, we set display: flex on the heading. However, this creates a new issue and that's the fact that span elements that contain only a space (" ") get squished to zero width.
<span> in Firefox DevTools.A simple fix for this is to set white-space: pre on our .letter spans.
Once we've done this, we can rotate our spans by an angle $a... in one direction or the other!
$a: 2deg;
.letter {
white-space: pre;
transform: rotatey($a);
}
.rev { transform: rotatey(-$a); }Since rotation around the y-axis squishes our letters horizontally, we can scale them along the x-axis by a factor ($f) that's the inverse of the cosine of $a.
$a: 2deg;
$f: 1/cos($a)
.letter {
white-space: pre;
transform: rotatey($a) scalex($f)
}
.rev { transform: rotatey(-$a) scalex($f) }If you wish to understand the why behind using this particular scaling factor, you can check out this older article where I explain it all in detail.
And that's it! We now have the 3D result we've been after! Do note however that the font used here was chosen so that our result looks good and another font may not work as well.
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Here’s a neat idea from Tim Kadlec. He uses the Modheader extension to toggle custom headers in his browser. It also lets him see when images are too big and need to be optimized in some way. This is a great way to catch issues like this in a local environment because browsers will throw an error and won’t display them at all!
As Tim mentions, the trick is with the Feature Policy header with the oversized-images policy, and he toggles it on like this:
Feature-Policy: oversized-images ‘none’;Tim writes:
By default, if you provide the browser an image in a format it supports, it will display it. It even helpful scales those images so they look great, even if you’ve provided a massive file. Because of this, it’s not immediately obvious when you’ve provided an image that is larger than the site needs.
The
oversized-imagespolicy tells the browser not to allow any images that are more than some predefined factor of their container size. The recommended default threshold is 2x, but you are able to override that if you would like.
I love this idea of using the browser to do linting work for us! I wonder what other ways we could use the browser to place guard rails around our work to prevent future mistakes...
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With a high of F and a low of 56F. Currently, it's 67F and Clear outside. Current wind speeds: 7 from the East Pollen: 3 Sunrise...
