The good old days when you could reliably predict market conditions are long gone. After the last three years, smart retailers are going to make flexibility a priority, especially for high-volume periods such as peak season. For resilience in the last mile, find solutions that can flex and scale with your business — expanding quickly with spikes and running lean during lulls.
There hasn’t been a one-size-fits-all solution for delivery in many years, but in the three years since the post-pandemic world, that’s truer than ever. I expect retailers to take a good, hard look at their delivery toolboxes. Every item has an optimal delivery method depending on the speed required for delivery.
For example, it’s hard to beat traditional carriers such as UPS for parcels going over 100 miles, especially at a high volume. But for many local deliveries, especially for big, oversized, perishable or out-of-the-box items, a solution such as Roadie will be optimal. Finding those methods and implementing them will keep customer satisfaction high and costs under control.
Also, retailers will look beyond buy online, deliver from stores (BODFS) to see how local delivery can integrate with their existing footprints in cities and towns. Can they deliver directly from warehouses and distribution centers instead of sorting, delivering to the store, shelving, picking again, packing, and then delivering to the end customer? It takes some innovating, but our retail customers are increasingly interested in ways they can turn their legacy warehouse network into something more flexible. That’s the major logistics trend I’m watching this year.