How do you compete with Amazon Prime when you’re selling on your own website and shipping from your warehouse or perhaps a retail location? The answer is to offer the same service of immediate delivery and, whilst for many ecommerce operations today that means next day delivery, Amazon Prime Now is offering same day delivery on an ever more frequent basis.
At TDC Global (The Delivery Conference hosted by MetaPack) we sat down with Santosh Sahu, On the dot CEO, who was effusive about the benefits that same day delivery can bring to retailers and the growth that On the dot are seeing.
Put simply, just about every business in the country is surrounded by anything up to 100,000 potential customers in a relatively small radius. Think of it in Pizza Delivery terms – a pizza needs to be delivered within about 15 minutes or so if it’s to arrive still warm so a radius of maybe 4 miles (less in cities) is the scope of customers who could be ordering from you for same day delivery.
How do you achieve same day delivery? Well, unless you have your own driver and van standing by the solution is to use On the dot with their 5,000 drivers and backed by the UK’s largest same day delivery company, CitySprint. On the dot delivery for every type of company from supermarkets to florists and even the ever popular cupcake delivery from bakeries. A growing part of their business is with pharmacies delivering repeat prescriptions.
One of the interesting things with On the dot is that they can be used for very mundane purchases, for instance if you’re in the middle of cooking dinner and realise you’ve forgotten an ingredient having a same day delivery within an hour can easily save you more than an hours time running into town, sometimes a same day delivery is simply a timed delivery for a moment when you know that you’ll be at home to receive the delivery – possibly even scheduled for the next day.
Whilst many online retailers don’t operate traditional retail stores, just about every online retailer has a warehouse. Offering same day deliveries within your local area can not only attract new customers but also build a loyal following for repeat business and it doesn’t really matter what you sell from batteries to clothing, motor parts to toiletries – if a customer knows a local source that can always supply quickly they’ll come back when they are ready to shop again.
On the Dot have seen so much success in the UK, they’ve recently started operations in New York with their service up and running. Santosh told us that there are four compelling reasons why you should consider offering their services (which can incidentally be accessed on a pay as you go basis):
- Compete head on with Amazon Prime and Amazon Prime Now
- Attract new local customers
- Increase customer loyalty
- Increase repeat purchases
What do you need to do? Simply set yourself up with On the dot and make sure your local customers know that you can offer same day delivery services in their area!
2 Responses
Oh yes yet again a simple solution to a problem.
We contacted a number of carriers and asked about matching the shipping speed of Amazon and yes they could all do so.
We could get them to send a vehicle every 1 hour to collect a parcel for same day delivery from 8 am up until 2pm for same day delivery anywhere in the UK.
The price was just a mere commitment to a £910,000 spend per annum.
Oh and that was the cheapest others rose to 1.22M
Where do we sign.
Exactly Mark…. same day delivery? hmmm that will be £650 for that £12.99 item please.
A more laughable article i have yet to come across. Not to meantion that it isn’t always possible to drop everything and rush to get out a single order. It would require someone watching orders as they come in, getting that order printed off and passed to someone else who can just stop what tey are doing and switch to that order, then pass to someone who is sat just waitng for it to be passed to they cna book it on….
Yes that is very cost effective.
Now in the financial world where documents need to be moved with great urgency, this works. But for generally retail…. it doesn’t, unless of course you have your own vehicle fleet.