Consumers’ growing appetite for ultrafast delivery is ratcheting up the pressure on supply chains to discover additional ways to streamline fulfillment. Amazon, which the Wall Street Journal reports has already cut its delivery times in half since 2018, is leading the way once again with a new strategy: removing intermediate steps between distribution center and home. Unlike some of the other things Amazon does, this is one your business can easily adopt — and take time, cost and carbon out of deliveries while delighting your customers. 

Amazon goods traditionally travel from distribution centers to sortation facilities to delivery stations, and finally are loaded onto trucks for home delivery. For other retailers, stores may be another or alternate stop for merchandise that’s ultimately sold online; these orders get picked from store inventory and shipped to customers. 

These extra stops can make sense from a process perspective. Sortation centers can be extremely efficient for high-volume order picking and shipping. But when the item a customer wants is sitting in a DC 30 miles away but travels another 100 to get sorted, staged and shipped to them, it adds unnecessary time and cost to that order.

Direct delivery from the DC changes all that. In many urban areas, Amazon can now deliver directly from DCs to customers living within an hour’s distance from their same-day delivery centers using their own “flex driver” gig delivery force. Thanks to crowdsourced delivery through Roadie Direct™, you can do this, too, skipping the “middle mile” by whisking orders directly from your fulfillment facility to customers within a 100-mile radius — farther than Amazon can currently achieve. And for you, that DC doesn’t even have to be urban. 

Why faster is better

The importance of same-day delivery to customers is hard to understate. Reuters reports that offering same-day delivery drives more frequent visits to Amazon’s website, as well as larger basket sizes. Target and Walmart are also chasing these benefits by ramping up their same-day delivery capabilities, and they are far from alone. 

Customer expectations for ultrafast delivery only continue to rise. If they can get their favorite burger delivered in 20 minutes, the thinking goes, why shouldn’t they get instant access to other things they need as well? And if it’s an eco-friendly delivery, even better.

Consider that:

• The World Economic Forum predicts demand for same-day delivery will grow annually by 36%, and instant delivery expectations will rise by 17% per year. 
• Capgemini found 74% of customers satisfied with delivery intend to increase purchase levels by 12% with their preferred seller.
• More than 60% of consumers are interested in environmentally friendly delivery methods, and 59% are willing to act if they’re not satisfied with retailers’ sustainable delivery efforts, according to a Descartes survey.

Ensuring the shortest possible distance between where inventory is stored and where demand is coming from is rapidly becoming another bedrock principle of smart retailing. Delivering directly from the DC to the customers that live nearby puts this practice into action. 

The economics of DC direct

One of the bedrock concepts of supply chain efficiency is cost per touch — the more times an item is handled during its route to the end customer, the higher the cost of that fulfillment. That’s one reason IKEA invites customers to retrieve their own flat pack furniture boxes right from warehouse shelves. 

Direct delivery from DCs removes several touchpoints from the typical order journey by moving items right from your DC to your customer’s door. Picking at the DC is not only a smarter choice for nearby customers; it also takes advantage of the greater efficiency of DCs; McKinsey found cost per pick is typically 1.5 to 2 times higher at a store vs. a distribution center.

Removing distance is not only faster and more efficient; it can also reduce the cost of delivering that order. In fact, Amazon told the WSJ that its fastest deliveries are sometimes its lowest cost deliveries as well, because it has shortened the fulfillment distance.

But direct delivery isn’t just about savings. A full accounting of the financial impact of adding direct from DC delivery must include the additional revenue this service generates. Almost half of shoppers abandon their online carts if shipping times are too long or aren’t provided, according to McKinsey. The payoff of saving the sale is clear to many retailers: Research by Attabotics found 80% of retailers view same-day delivery as a way to increase revenue while reducing supply chain costs.

Taking the “middle” out of the delivery journey also reduces an order’s environmental impact, supporting your carbon reduction goals. Instead of all that wasted energy driving an item away from the customer, only to ship it right back in the other direction, it only travels the short distance from DC to their door. 

How direct from DC works

Roadie Direct™ taps a network of 200,000 crowdsourced drivers to pick up orders right from the DC and quickly whisk them to your customers’ doorsteps. Roadie gives you a whole suite of tools to make it easy for your DC to collect and sort orders for direct delivery, from Roadie SmartSort™ for seamless sorting of orders and pre-sort routing to clustering algorithms that ensure a faster and more fuel-efficient sequence of customer deliveries. The Roadie network of independent drivers allows you to deliver direct from DCs to 97% of U.S. households, a reach Amazon would envy.

Roadie Direct™ comes with a lot of flexibility, too. You can scale use up and down as demand dictates, without worrying about any overhead costs. And you can offer your customer the same benefits of other Roadie services: narrow delivery windows, order tracking, direct communication with drivers and real-time notifications to keep customers informed. 

You can add Roadie Direct™ delivery in weeks with no additional hardware investment and minimal space and staff. And you can access direct from DC delivery via the Roadie portal, or integrate directly into your supply chain software using the Roadie API, so it’s easy to quickly and seamlessly add direct from DC delivery as another delivery channel. 

Fewer steps for greater speed

There’s a reason so many retailers are moving to smaller DCs in more locations, fulfilling from stores and working to position inventory closer to demand: the need for speed. Roadie Direct™ lets you turn your distribution centers into same-day logistics hubs, so you can lower your costs and reach customers faster.