Three things to keep in mind.
As a small business owner or manager, you can find it difficult to think of the best way to deliver to your customers locally and don´t lose profit and time.
Here are 3 insights from a local courier that has been working with small to middle size companies, helping them succeed at deliveries.
We hope you find it useful!
1- Create volume
You may not be moving as many products as some of the big retailers of the moment, but you still have orders coming from different parts of town. Sometimes, in order to fulfill these orders, and in hopes that one well-treated customer will help you win more clients, you may end up losing time and money. How? Well if you make deliveries that are too spread away from your location, and the average order is less than, let´s say $60, then you may be losing time and money on every delivery.
Over time we have found out that the best way a small company can help mitigate these leaks of income, and instead of losing money in deliveries, actually make deliveries a crucial part of their service, is by creating volume in their orders.
What do we mean by these? If you are sending 10 orders a week separated in every day of the week, then you are actually sending 2 orders per pickup. No doubt that taking out a driver for only 2 deliveries will make your cost per delivery increase. But if you instead gather all your weekly deliveries and send them the same day of the week, you will end up paying less.
You will still be providing a much faster service than you would if you use some of the larger carriers. And you will pay a lot less for it.
2- Certainty beats speed.
It is not completely true, that when someone puts an order online they expect to have a delivery van within the next 30 minutes knocking on their door. In fact, while customers do value fast delivery, certainty is more important to them.
If a person places an order, and they are able to know with certainty that their package will arrive within the settled schedule that is a lot more appealing for them, than being said they will receive their package in 2 hours and never actually get it.
So, if you are a small company that needs to deal with deliveries, don´t think that you need to impress your customers by delivering their products right away. This will probably cost you a lot of money, and it may not always be achievable.
3- Dive deep into zip codes and areas.
It is important that you know the areas you are sending the most deliveries to, and which are you sending the less. If you are consistently sending too little volume to a particular area, it is possible that this may be making the whole operation more expensive.
Since most managers tend to look at deliveries from a client satisfaction perspective, this is sometimes forgotten. While it is very important that your delivery operation works as a way of keeping clients happy, you still have to look after the efficiency of your operation.
For example, you may find that by gathering the deliveries to one particular area, in only one batch, you are able to save money. Keep in mind that when a route is priced it is priced based on volume, and this means the number of stops and the density between them. So to keep a healthy, money-making, delivery operation it is not only about how many orders you are sending, but you also need to consider the distance between one another. If the stops are too spread away then the prices per stop will increase, even though, you may be shipping many packages.
You can ask your delivery provider for an analysis of the operation with your orders mapped, and ways of improvement.