“People have this overwhelming sense of fear that their stuff won’t be there,” said David Echegoyen, vice president of marketing for Jet.com, which is owned by Walmart. “That’s been the big question for us: How can we remove friction from the e-commerce experience, and in particular, with deliveries?”
While 30% of Americans report having experienced package theft, in attempt to avoid the inconvenience of missed deliveries and lost or stolen packages from their homes, 35% of Americans ship their packages to an alternate address, resulting in extra costs, distance traveled, and increased emissions.
“The biggest change that everyone’s seeing is the shift from this B2B environment to a B2C environment,” says Louis DeJianne, director of marketing for consumer goods, apparel and retail at United Parcel Service (UPS).
The shift, while trending for years, has truly accelerated over the past five to ten years as ecommerce was normalized. Although UPS and FedEx have been in the space for decades, their networks were not necessarily ready for the change. Typically relying on the United States Postal Service (USPS) for many residential deliveries, the demand for specific-day deliveries has strained that model, as the USPS makes just one stop at a residence per day.
Meanwhile, “residential delivery is not the way that the carriers have designed their system,” Boyle says. “So what’s happening is a crunch on profit margins because what logistics providers are trying to do is create delivery density,” to mimic the Postal Service’s. “That’s the real last mile problem.”
“It really comes down to three things: choice, convenience and control — and offering that to the retailer as well as the end consumer,” UPS’ DeJianne says. “We want to make that final mile delivery as convenient as possible so the end consumer will then buy more from that particular retailer.”
At UPS, if we shave a mile off of every route across the U.S. every day — $50 million savings,” Rogers said. “It adds up.”
With the NextPakk ecosystem and business model, shaving off extra miles is a given.
Stay up-to-date on our ICO through our social media channels:
