For years, consumers have demanded faster, freer, more frictionless delivery across the board, thanks to groundwork laid by Amazon. The pandemic put that trend on steroids. An entirely new, broad demographic of consumers has switched to shopping online, looking for home delivery for groceries, household staples, and goods of all kinds.
Many retailers have struggled to adapt. Those with robust e-commerce platforms have most successfully met the surge; meanwhile, thousands of other retailers rushed to build them, and then had to figure out how to get products to consumers sheltering at home. The result is a retail business model that flipped completely, almost overnight, and is still evolving today.
Home delivery for anything and everything isn’t a new idea. Years ago, we used to have visits from the milkman, the iceman, the egg man…all showing up on our doorsteps. You could argue that modern e-commerce systems are simply an updated version of an old model, one that worked for decades.
But the most important — and intuitive — business lesson from the pandemic is this: Once consumers experience the convenience of e-commerce ordering and home delivery, they’re more likely to continue it. No one expects consumer buying behavior to revert completely to pre-pandemic habits.
The same goes for demand for fast and easy same-day delivery. COVID-19 took same-day delivery from a “nice-to-have” offering to a “must-have” for all sorts of goods. It’s also brought into sharp relief the power of crowdsourced delivery networks, which, unlike traditional fixed-asset models, can flex and adapt as business surges. This distributed model has fewer points of failure, can scale rapidly, and ultimately enables retailers to be more resilient and responsive to consumer needs. Crowdsourced platforms like Roadie can reliably solve the hardest part of that journey — covering that last mile, the very same day.