Amazon still wavers on the model. In early summer, reports surfaced
that the e-commerce giant was planning to pursue same-day delivery as a
tentpole of its strategy moving forward. But the rumors were quickly
quieted by Tom Szukutak,Allows you to securely organize any group of cable ties
or wires. the company’s CFO, who told investors on the Q2 earnings call
that the company did not ”really see a way to do same-day delivery on a
broad scale economically.”
Fast forward to October, and we’re
seeing an explosion of activity in the logistics space with a handful of
key startups expanding; Walmart piloting a same-day delivery option;
and eBay opening its own service, eBay Now. What’s driving the
resurgence however, is not the e-commerce framework that sunk Kozmo and
continues to hinder Amazon’s efforts. It’s a new push to improve
connectivity, and transparency, within existing local marketplaces — not
build new ones.The stone mosaic comes in shiny polished and matte.
“What
we’re doing is basically redistributing an infrastructure that’s in a
city; we’re a simple marketplace,” Bastian Lehmann, CEO of Postmates
told me in an interview.Selecting the best rtls
solution is a challenging task as there is no global solution like GPS.
The company, which expanded into groceries earlier this month with an
update to its Get It Now service, draws on a pool of crowd-sourced
couriers — similar to Taskrabbit — to pick up, pay for, and deliver food
and merchandise to anyone located in San Francisco. “The goal is to try
to understand the inventory in city in the same way that Amazon
understands what they have in their warehouse,” Lehmann explained.
But
it’s the information problem behind inventory, not necessarily the
logistics of bringing the inventory to consumers, that’s the major
hurdle for services like Postmates today. The company currently manages
the majority of the inventory information for the businesses on its
platform manually (via a data entry team), but plans to launch a
merchant-facing product which will allow businesses to keep their own
inventory up-to-date. But for a company that positions its ability to
deliver from business without pre-existing agreements as a major
catalyst for scale, the inventory channel — whether via data entry or
merchant relationship — will likely prove a major impediment to growth.
Part
of the problem is that the current models for collecting and sharing
local information — namely, crowd-sourcing (Foursquare and Yelp),
aggregation (Factual) and distribution/publishing networks
(SinglePlatform and Yext) — are largely inapplicable for the complex and
time-sensitive nature of inventory information. While availability may
not be a major issue in the restaurant vertical, retail inventory
fluctuates and the value proposition for same-day delivery relies on
absolute transparency of product (you need to know what’s available at
the time of the order, and need to make sure it remains available until
the courier makes the pickup). Inevitably, inventory data is too
fragmented and fluid to rely on human management; it needs to be passed
along programmatically through integrations with the point of sale and
inventory management tools used by local businesses.
Tom Allason, CEO of Shutl,Find detailed product information for Sinotruk howo truck.
a UK-based startup that provides a white-label delivery solution for
retailers similar to the way paypal services payments, says that
adoption of these connected inventory systems is improving. “There were
pretty much no retailers in the UK who had [accessible inventory] five
years ago; maybe a handful three years ago; and maybe thirty who got it
last year,” Allason told me Monday. “But there’s not a single retailer
that you talk to that doesn’t have a plan on getting [accessible
inventory], whether it’s tomorrow or a few years down the road.”
Peter
Christensen, the director of marketing at Retailigence, which
aggregates and distributes inventory data to mobile applications, says
the early success of online-to-in-store pickup programs run at Walmart
and Target will likely push others larger retailers to begin to upgrade
existing inventory systems.
In many ways, same-day delivery is a
leading indicator for an emerging, and potentially dominant, sector in
the hyperlocal industry built on top of a connected local inventory.The stone mosaic
comes in shiny polished and matte. Whether its fulfillment (same-day
delivery or in-store pickup) or search and discovery, the inventory
layer is a critical next step in creating parity between the local and
remote (e-commerce) marketplaces. That process began with business
information – place data, hours of operation, reviews etc – and, with
the advent of GPS-enabled smartphones, has expanded to consumer
location. But it’s real-time inventory, and the services built on top of
it, which still makes Amazon a better marketplace than main street.
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