Intra-city logistics is the moving of goods within one city, booked on an app that sends a mini-truck, a three-wheeler or a two-wheeler to the pickup point. People use it to move a shop's stock, a piece of furniture or the things in a flat. The app works much like a ride-hailing app, but it carries goods instead of people.
The customer enters the pickup and drop addresses, and chooses a vehicle size. The sizes range from a two-wheeler for a small parcel to a mini-truck that carries about a tonne. The app shows the fare before the booking. The fare depends on the distance, the size of the vehicle and the time of day, and the distance is worked out from a digital map. The app then offers the trip to nearby drivers with a vehicle of that size. The drivers are not the platform's employees. They own or rent their vehicles, and accept trips through the app. The platform earns a commission on each trip. This is the marketplace model, applied to vehicles.
Consider a family in Hyderabad moving from a one-bedroom flat in Kukatpally to a flat in Gachibowli, about 15 km away. They do not need a full moving service, only a vehicle and some help with loading. On Sunday morning, they book a mini-truck with a helper. The app shows a fare of ₹1,850. A driver 2 km away accepts the trip within a minute. The family sees his name, the vehicle number and the vehicle's position on the map. The driver and his helper load the bed, the fridge and 20 cartons, and drive to Gachibowli. At the new flat, the family pays the ₹1,850 by UPI.
Small businesses use the same apps every day. A kirana store sends a two-wheeler to collect stock from a wholesaler. A furniture shop sends a sofa to a customer's home. A business that sends many trips a day can book them together. The app then uses route optimisation software to decide the order of the stops for each vehicle. For the driver, the app is a steady source of trips between regular jobs, and it pays the fares into the driver's account.
Intra-city logistics differs from packers and movers. A packers-and-movers company surveys the home, packs everything, moves it, often to another city, and unpacks it. An intra-city app sends only the vehicle, and sometimes a helper. It also differs from a load board, on which truck owners search for long-distance loads and agree the price themselves. In an intra-city app, the app sets the price and assigns the trip.