From Gimmick to Game Changer

When you heat water to 99 degrees Celcius, it fizzes and foams.

It makes a great cup of coffee — but it’s useless in a steam engine.

At 100 degrees, everything changes. You get steam trains powering up mountains, electric power plants and whirring turbines. The difference is just one degree.

For retailers, same-day delivery is that ‘one degree’.

Getting products to your customers in as little as an hour is a transformational game-changer for high-street retailers. And for some, it’s an imperative to survival.

So here’s the exam question: why do some people still treat it like it’s a novelty or a gimmick?

· You see this when online retailers announce that they’re trialing delivery by drone, a few days before Black Friday.

· You see this when large taxi companies announce ‘temporary’ services to deliver Christmas trees at the push of a button.

· You see this when pizza companies ‘experiment’ with delivery by canoe for people who live next to rivers.

It generates press — and then gets quietly dropped.

The implication is that same-day delivery is a stunt, and that delivering a package in a short space of time requires some kind of absurd Top Gear challenge.

I think this attitude stems from people who remember the first dot-com boom.

If you watched the 2000 Super Bowl, the ad breaks were a parade of start-ups with catchy domain names offering to bring stuff to your sofa sharpish.

There was Kozmo.com, which offered 60-minute movies and snacks in New York and Seattle. There was same-day grocery business Webvan, which would bring you a box of cornflakes with no minimum spend.

The turn of the century saw plenty of retail start-ups hitch their wagon to the god of ‘instant gratification’, and when they flamed out same-day delivery was sent to logistics Siberia.

Now, they say pioneers return with arrows in their backs — and to be fair, these firms were up against some daunting fundamentals.

Back in 2000, only 30% of people were online. Hardly anybody had broadband. Nobody had smartphones. Plus, offering same-day delivery necessitated building a complete last mile hub-and-spoke logistics infrastructure from scratch.

The good news is that today, the market is ready. What’s more, getting stuff to your customers fast is a simple technological bolt-on.

You can plug into Stuart’s API, or even use a simple dashboard, and get packages to customers in as little as an hour.

All this adds up to a huge opportunity.

Today, just 4% of online shoppers have a favourite high street retailer that already offers same-day delivery.

The appetite for on-demand delivery isn’t part of a future trend — it’s here now, and there are huge gains for retailers who choose to act sooner rather than later.

Global brands and small businesses use Stuart to deliver everything from groceries and food to beauty products and must-have wardrobes.

Get in touch to find out more: sales.uk@stuart.com