The past five years have paved the way for a new age of retail—stores have become omnichannel-driven showrooms, checkout has become as simple as a flick of the phone, and teeming competition has driven retailers to create curated experiences for their customers.
Most fingers point at the e-commerce giants, Amazon in particular, for putting pressure on brick-and-mortar stores to compete on convenience and personalization. Particularly around delivery, Amazon changed the game with two-day shipping for Prime members. As retailers have fought back by leveraging their physical footprints to improve fulfillment times with offerings like click and collect, Amazon upped the ante with one-day delivery.
There’s no doubt about one thing: Increasing consumer demand for convenience is as important as it’s ever been. The focus has been on enabling same- and next-day delivery, but that’s also been putting retailers under enormous strain and compressing already thin margins.
If you’re solely focused on matching Amazon’s one-day shipping promise, you’re missing the bigger picture. Consumers want more than same-day, next-day, or scheduled deliveries—they want the freedom to choose.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Capgemini found that 73% of consumers think receiving a delivery in a convenient time slot is more important than receiving it quickly. It ultimately comes down to a question of time vs. money. Sometimes customers are willing to pay for something to be delivered in a few hours, and sometimes they’d rather save money and receive it in a week.
Instead of focusing on keeping up with Amazon’s expedited shipping, retailers need to focus on building better customer experiences. From a delivery standpoint, this means creating a logistics infrastructure that can reliably deliver orders when buyers want them delivered. This is accomplished by leveraging multiple delivery models and creating a reliable set of options that includes urgent, same-day, next-day, and more.
For retailers determined to stay competitive, partnering with innovative providers for home delivery and last-mile logistics can add optionality while avoiding the challenges of building out owned asset networks or expanding service with traditional parcel networks.
The bottom line is this: Consumers want what they want, when they want it. The maturation of e-commerce has ushered in an era of personalization at scale and growing customer demand for convenient, flexible shopping experiences. Next-day and same-day delivery sit at the center, but customers are ultimately focused on choosing the right fulfillment option for each and every order.
Otherwise, they’ll leave and find the retailer who can.
