The state of the on-demand delivery space: a year on from global lockdowns
By Sacha Michaud, Co-Founder, Glovo
It has been more than a year since Italy announced the first of Europe’s coronavirus lockdowns.
Across the continent countries began to follow suit, slamming the shutters down on public life in an effort to curb the spread of coronavirus. Slowly and then all at once the world changed.
The pandemic has affected almost every facet of our daily lives. In fact, I struggle to think of anything that it hasn’t touched and altered in some small yet significant way. It has changed the way we work, the way we socialise, the very way in which we live.
The majority of businesses have been forced to close or, as in so many cases, drastically adjust the way they operate so they can continue to open. And what little remained open did so under strict curfew and restrictions on capacity.
In public, we’ve all had to adopt masks and hand sanitiser and adapt to social distancing to meet new health and safety standards. Periods of quarantine and self-isolation became standard.
As consumers, months of quarantine, social distancing and self-isolation have sparked a new set of habits. Trends that, while having been on the rise for years in the before-times, have accelerated at a rapid rate during lockdown.
The truth is that we have hit fast-forward on an entire decade of digital adoption. And when it comes to online deliveries, according to a recent report on consumer behaviour by McKinsey, we travelled 10 years in about eight weeks.
Retailers need to remain relevant
Following such dramatic shifts in consumer behaviour, in order to remain relevant, retailers will have to work harder than ever to meet ever evolving consumer expectations.
It has been easier for digital first and omnichannel players to pivot, but bricks and mortar stores and more traditional retailers that have prioritised in-store engagement have struggled to respond.
To remain relevant in the new normal, many high street retailers will have to reimagine the way in which they do business.
Customers are now demanding more from retailers than ever before and as they become less likely to shop in-store the online experience has to come up to standard.
The pandemic has provided traditional retailers with an opportunity to modernise and simplify their online offerings, from selecting items to purchase right through to delivery, ensuring a streamlined and seamless process for the customer.
The biggest challenge now is that there’s an expectation that everyday items will be delivered in minutes rather than days.
The race toward quicker delivery times has seen restaurants, stores and pharmacies have to deal with delivery orders on a scale never seen before in such a short space of time.
If local commerce is to survive then it needs to be agile. It needs to find new ways to adapt and scale. Despite being one of the last remaining segments to digitalise, high street stores possess one unique advantage over their digital-first competitors: proximity.
They are positioned close to consumers, whereas the e-commerce giants store their products miles away from the customer in warehouses on the outskirts of towns and cities or, in some cases, a different country altogether.
The window in which to act is closing. Traditional retailers have maybe a year, two at best, before the e-commerce giants decide to move into the high street and get closer to their customers.
The problem is that many retailers don’t have the functionality to cater to this demand. In the digital-first era, we all know what customers want.
They want a first class UX. They expect ease of use, a seamless experience free of pain points. They want simplicity married to effectiveness and efficiency. Anything that isn’t that, isn’t an option.
Digitalising the high street
When we think of on-demand delivery more often than not our first thought is food. Over the last few years disruptive startups, such as ourselves, have completely transformed the food delivery landscape.
Our speed, availability and flexibility saw us deemed an essential service by many governments during the first wave of lockdowns and was essential in keeping many restaurants and stores within the hospitality sector open.
Now, in the wake of the pandemic, many delivery platforms are moving beyond food and expanding their offerings.
As Europe’s first multi-category pioneers, something that has been a part of our service from the very beginning, we’re seeing the competition follow where we have led and begin to embrace what we’ve always done.
This is a win-win for everyone: for us, for our customers and especially for retailers.
The extra competition means that we have to be better, smarter and faster, and it also plays a big part in educating and growing the market. However, the real benefit is to high street stores.
By partnering with on-demand delivery companies, retailers can convert their stores into “virtual warehouses” for immediate deliveries that take minutes rather than days.
This is where they can make up ground on the e-commerce giants and step in to meet the growing demand of customers who want their purchases within an hour of placing their orders.
Taking on the giants
When it comes to our partners, we help them deliver their product or service to their customers within thirty minutes or less — something we refer to as “q-commerce” (quick commerce).
To ensure that we could sustain this commitment, during the most intense periods of the lockdown, we worked hand in hand with our partners to understand the needs of their customers, the changing trends they were facing so that they could meet the demand.
It is time from retailers to embrace the evolution of q-commerce, leverage their proximity to their customers and focus on convenient, instantaneous deliveries.
This is something that they are uniquely positioned to fulfil. But they need to understand the urgency of digitalisation and recognise the role that on-demand delivery platforms can play in helping them take that next step forward.
The mass shift online was already underway before the pandemic but we've come very far forward in a short amount of time during the lockdowns and the change in consumer habits are here to stay. There’s no going back and what was a must have before is now an absolute necessity.
The decline of the high-street is a symptom of the modern consumer’s desire: convenience. Online shopping, with unlimited browsing and efficient and effortless purchasing options has supplanted the in-store experience, something which now seems limited and cumbersome and analogue.
Traditional retailers have one ace card left to play and that’s to leverage their unique position close to customers. It’s an advantage that they shouldn’t sleep on because the likes of Amazon won’t wait too long before they close that window.
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