It wasn’t that long ago that home delivery looked like the magic bullet that the local retailing sector was looking for. Sparked into life by a wee company from Dundee called Snappy Shopper, home delivery promised very significant additional weekly sales, ridiculous basket spends, access to new customers from outside the natural catchment area of your store and very little impact on in-store sales.
There were stores in Dundee doing £20k and £30k a week in home delivery sales and all you needed was an app to manage the orders, a Facebook page to promote the service, a driver or two and a rudimentary system for picking and packing orders.
Covid only served to accelerate the trend, sparking a wave of incomers like Getir, Gorillas, Gopuff and all the rest.
Then the wheels started to come off. Getir and Gorillas pulled back out almost as quickly as they had piled in and, a little incomprehensibly, so too did many local retailers.
It’s not easy to understand why our sector seemed so reluctant to embrace this once-in-a-career opportunity to transform stores sales. And I do mean transform. Some stores do more in home delivery than they do in-store. Daniall Nadeem at Spar Motherwell Road did £8k of home delivery sales in a single day during Storm Éowyn, as a very recent example.
So it all went a little quiet but, as our cover story this month discusses, there are some stirrings again as home delivery seems to be back on the table. Progressive Glasgow Premier retailer Girish Jeeva has introduced 24-hour delivery – and it’s doing really well – and Booker has introduced its own home delivery platform for its various symbol groups. Scotmid is ramping up its home delivery service with a partnership with West Lothian-based platform Scoffable and even Waitrose has just agreed a new deal with Just Eat to accelerate its convenience ambitions.
In a sense, home delivery should belong to local retailers. Home delivery is convenience on steroids. We should own this space, and our cover story helps show you how you can do just that. It’s moderately complex to do it well – but the rewards more than justify the effort and planning.
Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR
Delivering big time
It wasn’t that long ago that home delivery looked like the magic bullet that the local retailing sector was looking for. Sparked into life by a wee company from Dundee called Snappy Shopper, home delivery promised very significant additional weekly sales, ridiculous basket spends, access to new customers from outside the natural catchment area of your store and very little impact on in-store sales.
There were stores in Dundee doing £20k and £30k a week in home delivery sales and all you needed was an app to manage the orders, a Facebook page to promote the service, a driver or two and a rudimentary system for picking and packing orders.
Covid only served to accelerate the trend, sparking a wave of incomers like Getir, Gorillas, Gopuff and all the rest.
Then the wheels started to come off. Getir and Gorillas pulled back out almost as quickly as they had piled in and, a little incomprehensibly, so too did many local retailers.
It’s not easy to understand why our sector seemed so reluctant to embrace this once-in-a-career opportunity to transform stores sales. And I do mean transform. Some stores do more in home delivery than they do in-store. Daniall Nadeem at Spar Motherwell Road did £8k of home delivery sales in a single day during Storm Éowyn, as a very recent example.
So it all went a little quiet but, as our cover story this month discusses, there are some stirrings again as home delivery seems to be back on the table. Progressive Glasgow Premier retailer Girish Jeeva has introduced 24-hour delivery – and it’s doing really well – and Booker has introduced its own home delivery platform for its various symbol groups. Scotmid is ramping up its home delivery service with a partnership with West Lothian-based platform Scoffable and even Waitrose has just agreed a new deal with Just Eat to accelerate its convenience ambitions.
In a sense, home delivery should belong to local retailers. Home delivery is convenience on steroids. We should own this space, and our cover story helps show you how you can do just that. It’s moderately complex to do it well – but the rewards more than justify the effort and planning.
Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR
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