"We shop for groceries every day, but doing it well is hard. A completely new way to shop for groceries, the kind everyone dreamed of but no one ever pulled off—that is exactly "Kurly N Mart.""
At the "Naver Commerce Meetup" held at Naver Square Jongno in Inui-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, on the 9th, Kurly CEO Kim Seul-a introduced Kurly N Mart this way. Kurly N Mart is a dawn delivery service unveiled on the 4th within "Naver Plus Store" through a partnership between Naver and Kurly.
Appearing in a green top symbolizing Naver, not the purple outfit associated with Kurly, Kim opened by saying, "Wearing green, I can see purple and green go very well together. Kurly and Naver have different strengths, and that is why I believe this is a partnership that can accomplish very difficult things together."
Kurly N Mart drew attention as Kurly's first entry into an external platform. Even if you are not a Kurly customer, Naver Plus Store users can receive Kurly's fresh foods and daily necessities via dawn delivery. Customers who purchase 20,000 won or more receive free delivery.
Products listed on Naver are also delivered at dawn using Kurly's logistics and delivery infrastructure. Kurly's logistics subsidiary Kurly Nextmile joined the Naver Fulfillment Alliance (NFA) on the 1st and began dawn delivery for Smart Store products.
Kim cited "Kurly's scalability" as the significance of this collaboration. Until now, the focus had been on good products and curation, but Kurly joined hands with Naver to reach more customers. Over the past few years, Kurly's monthly active users (MAU) stood at about 3 million. Kim said, "Since we are collaborating with Naver, which everyone in the country uses, we will expand our touchpoints with 40 million users," adding, "We will share Kurly's dawn delivery infrastructure to increase logistics efficiency for both companies."
Some have raised concerns about cannibalization. They say Kurly N Mart could steal Kurly's customers. But Kim said Kurly and Naver Plus Store customers are different. Kurly has many customers seeking premium or scarce products, while Naver has many customers closer to the Korean average, and product planning has been differentiated accordingly, Kim explained.
Kim said, "Naver Plus Store users tend to have larger families and greater demand for bulk products than Kurly users. Their brand preferences are different, too," adding, "Through Kurly N Mart, we can now sell more mainstream and familiar items within our existing product categories. At last, Kurly has become a company that sells bleach well."
Through this collaboration, Naver has also shored up its previously cited weakness in the fresh grocery shopping segment. Naver Plus Store has strengthened benefits through partnerships such as with Netflix, but it has operated as an open market and was seen as less competitive against Coupang, which has its own logistics and delivery.
In the market, some interpret Naver, which is expanding its shopping business, as pursuing cooperation with an eye toward acquiring Kurly. On this, Lee Yoon-sook, head of Naver's shopping business division, flatly said, "There are no acquisition plans."
Lee said, "We were the first to give Kurly a love call," adding, "In grocery shopping, product and logistics are the same thing, and we thought Kurly was the only operator in Korea that could do this. Management had no objections." Lee continued, "To sell bean sprouts and tofu well, you have to invest a lot in cold chain and dawn delivery. Rather than investing ourselves, we wanted to solve the problem through a healthy partnership," adding, "Kurly, too, likely sees that partnering with us can acquire customers at a relatively low cost."
Kim said, "It is true that e-commerce is a business that costs a lot of money, but if you do not provide users with more than what money can buy, you cannot last, so we have tried to build a structure where users and sellers can remain in the ecosystem." Kim added, "I believe effort and time are the most expensive, and this project has seen the most time and effort invested since our founding. Our goal is to reach the stage where Kurly's logistics centers are bursting at the seams and delivery trucks are packed to the brim, so that tangible assets are being invested as quickly as possible."