Not so long ago only one in 10 retailers offered home delivery but under coronavirus around two-thirds of retailers offer the service, making 600,000 deliveries a week, according to recent ACS figures. Home delivery is the biggest game-changer to emerge from the pandemic. Three retailing duos explain why.
Ross McPherson & Mandi Duncan
Day-Today Doonfoot & Day-Today Barrassie
“Home delivery has been nothing short of a game-changer for us in the two stores. It’s unbelievable, really. We introduced home delivery way before coronavirus, as it was something we thought had potential to grow both businesses. We went with Snappy Shopper and launched it only in Barrassie and it was doing really well. We were aiming to add around £3k a week to the sales. Then Covid-19 happened so we added it the service at Doonfoot too and for the last month or so we’ve been doing about additional £10k a week in additional home delivery sales. And that’s £10k extra in both stores! That equated at the peak to an extra £80k a month in sales.
”The basket spend for home delivery is also extraordinary. Barrassie’s average basket spend is £43 and in Doonfoot it’s £34. We do around 70 a day for Barrassie and 35 a day at Doonfoot. There are extra costs, of course. We have three drivers at Barrassie, all people on furlough or who have been made redundant, so that’s quite a nice story too. And in Doonfoot we have two students. All of them have been trained in licensing to ensure they can properly check IDs on any orders with age-restricted products.
“We charge £3 for delivery and it’s opened up a whole new world for us. We do a lot of leafleting so we’re getting orders from three and four miles away, customers who would never have used us before. They’ve got stores closer to them but I guess they like the convenience of having their shopping delivered to their door for them. And we don’t hike prices, so they’re paying the same as they would if they came to the store, which will hopefully keep them using the service.
”We see this as a long-term strategy. We introduced it way before Covid-19 and I think we will retain a lot of our new home delivery customers. We’re not kidding ourselves on. Lots of people will go back to using supermarkets once this is all over, but I think we’ll retain quite a few of them.
Natalie & Martin Lightfoot
Londis Solo Convenience, Baillieston
“We’ve been doing home delivery for a little while now. It was something we always wanted to do. We’d been talking to Snappy Shopper since last June but it took until about 12 weeks ago to actually get round to implementing it. We launched it initially as a free delivery service because it felt like the right thing to do under the circumstances, but it became so popular so quickly that we really needed to start charging. We only introduced the delivery fee in the last few weeks and we were afraid we’d lose a lot of our customers now we’re charging.
“As far as we can tell, however, we haven’t lost a single customer. Additionally, we’ve seen the basket spend rocket in recent weeks. When it was free delivery the figure was around £26. Now that there’s a charge, the spend has risen to £35. Before we were getting some customers using the service twice a day but now that they’re paying a delivery fee, I guess they just get everything they need in one go so that they don’t have to pay twice.
“Monday to Thursday we average 25 to 35 deliveries a day. Weekends are higher. On Saturday we did 63. We actually started out more focused on food-to-go as the key opportunity but the store is quite small and doesn’t have room for a big unit. We’re also surrounded by fast food outlets on the high street we’re on, so we decided that home delivery was maybe a better option.
“The Snappy Shopper app is nice and clean and it’s easy to use for both shoppers and retailers. I looked at other options but when you use third-party delivery companies you’re automatically slashing your margin or overcharging customers. We were keen to keep in-store pricing on the app because our customers know how much things cost, and wouldn’t have responded well to paying inflated prices to have them delivered. Snappy Shopper lets us keep our prices just as they are in-store.
“After Covid-19, I think we will retain the majority of our home delivery customers. Home delivery is actually working out really well because so many customers are now used to ordering their food from the fast food outlets that it feels quite natural for them to then order their alcohol, soft drinks and confectionery from us at the same time. I don’t think that will change when lockdown ends because the ‘want it now’ mentality is now firmly ingrained.”
James Brundle & Chris O’Connor
Four Eat17 Spar stores and one restaurant in London
“We knew when the pandemic started that we needed to change the retail-foodservice landscape if we were going to emerge stronger afterwards. When our restaurant had to close, we knew it would be very hard to make a takeout-and-delivery model work profitably. About 10 weeks ago, by using Deliveroo and Snappy Shopper, we started to do some home deliveries. It’s been successful so far. We’re doing about £8,000 a week through the home delivery channels.”
