Why build for vendors as well as customers?

A marketplace only works if both sides can use it. The merchant dashboard follows a one-screen-per-action rule so shop owners with limited digital experience can accept orders, manage inventory and pull dispatch reports after minimal training.

What payment methods does it support?

UPI, card and an in-app wallet, all behind a single checkout screen. That screen was designed specifically for people paying inside an app for the first time, so the flow avoids the branching that trips up new users.

Is the platform live?

Yes. Difwa operates across 50+ localities in Lucknow, with the customer app and vendor dashboard both published on Google Play.

Marketplace

Difwa Water

On-demand drinking water delivery connecting households to verified local suppliers, with live tracking and route batching.

Country: India
Platform: Android, Admin Panel

Visit live site

About the client

Difwa

Difwa Water is an on-demand drinking water delivery platform built to solve an urban logistics problem — getting safe water to doorsteps quickly and affordably. We built the mobile ecosystem end to end, from order placement through to bottle drop-off, plus the merchant side that keeps suppliers running.

Client background: A Lucknow-based water delivery operation working through phone orders and informal vendor relationships, with no digital ordering or tracking.
Business model: Marketplace. Households order from nearby verified suppliers; Difwa takes a margin per delivery and provides the vendor tooling.
Target audience: Households in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, many of them ordering through an app for the first time.
Market: 50+ localities across Lucknow.

Research & discovery

What we learned before building

Discovery ran before a line of production code. These are the findings that changed the brief.

User Research
We sat with households placing orders and with the shop owners taking them. The finding that reshaped the brief: buyers did not want more choice, they wanted certainty. Knowing a jar would arrive within the hour mattered more than saving five rupees, and every extra tap between opening the app and confirming an order lost people who were new to smartphones.
Competitor Analysis
Existing water apps were built for metros — English-first interfaces, card-only payments, and delivery windows measured in days. None handled the informal vendor networks that actually supply Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, which is where the demand sits.
Market Analysis
Lucknow's water supply runs through hundreds of small independent shops with no digital presence. The opportunity was not to replace them but to give them dispatch tooling and put them on a map, so the platform grows with the vendors rather than against them.
Journey Mapping
Mapping the round trip end to end exposed the real bottleneck. It was not ordering; it was dispatch. A shop owner assigning riders by hand could only handle so many orders before the day capped out, so the routing engine became the centre of the build rather than a later optimisation.

Our solution

The decisions we made

Each one traceable to a constraint above, not to a preference.

An automated route planning engine that clusters orders geographically and assigns delivery batches to riders in real time.

Location-based store discovery so a household finds and orders from the nearest verified supplier in seconds.

UPI, card and wallet behind a single checkout screen designed for people paying in an app for the first time.

A merchant dashboard built on a one-screen-per-action rule, so shop owners can run it after minimal training.

Key features

What Difwa Water does

Everything shipped and in production, not a roadmap.

Live delivery tracking
Rider position and ETA on a map from dispatch to doorstep.
Daily subscriptions
Recurring deliveries with pause and skip controls.
Multiple local vendors
Compare verified suppliers by distance and price.
Secure payments
UPI, card and in-app wallet in one checkout.
Rate your vendor
Per-delivery ratings that feed supplier ranking.
Rider mode
A built-in mode for riders to accept and complete batched runs.
Merchant dashboard
Inventory, order acceptance, earnings and dispatch reports.
In-app support
Order-level help without leaving the app.

Technology stack

What it runs on

The choices behind the build, grouped by layer.

Frontend: React Native
Backend: Node.js
Socket.io
Database: MongoDB
Cloud: AWS
Third Party APIs: Google Maps API
Razorpay

System architecture

How it fits together

Select any layer to see what it does. Data flows top to bottom.

Results

What it does today

Orders delivered: 1M+
Customers: 50K+
Verified vendors: 200+
Customer rating: 4.8

Source: difwa.com.

Screens

Inside the product

FAQ

Common questions

Incoming orders are clustered geographically and assigned to riders as batches rather than one at a time. The engine reassigns in real time as new orders land, which is what brought average delivery time down by more than 40% against manual dispatch.