Mastering Same-Day Delivery: Insights and Advice for eCommerce Businesses | Steve Orenstein

Steve Orenstein

00:00:00.080 - 00:00:12.080

Are you going to get more repeat customers? And I think it varies depending on the type of product that you're selling.

And is it a product that does, you know, result in people purchasing it more often? And is delivery going to make it better for that for your customer?

Matt Edmundson

00:00:17.840 - 00:04:04.210

Welcome to the E Commerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmondson. Now, the E Commerce Podcast is a show all about helping you deliver e commerce. Wow.

And to help us do just that, I'm chatting with today's guest, Steve Orenstein from Locate2You about how you can master. Oh yes, same day delivery. We're gonna be talking about how we can do that in our own e commerce business.

But before Steve and I dive into our conversation, let me share with you a podcast. Pick a previous episode or two that I think you might enjoy from the E Commerce Podcast archives.

The first one, given today's topic is how to build a fulfillment infrastructure that will scale with your. That conversation was with Harry Drapek, which was a phenomenal conversation. So do check that out.

And actually I did an episode way back which probably has still some relevance though, on understanding the real costs of e commerce shipping for your business.

You can access our podcast picks and our entire podcast archive for free on our [email protected] plus, if you're there, sign up for the newsletter. We will send all the links to our podcast picks along with the notes and the links from today's conversation with Steve.

They all get delivered straight to your inbox at no cost to you, which is pretty amazing. Plus, we'll email you every week when we do a new episode so you stay up to date. Now, are you struggling to grow your e commerce business?

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That's the sponsor. Let's talk a little bit about today's guest.

Steve is a born entrepreneur who blazed his trail by ditching University at 19 to build his own business, Connector Field. After successfully selling it to Fleetmatics, he set his sights on revolutionizing same day delivery with the groundbreaking Zoom 2 you platform.

And now also the locate2you platform.

With over 120,000 happy customers ranging from SMEs to corporate giants like DHL, Bunnings and Nespresso, Steve is shaking up the delivery world one parcel at a time. And given that this is such a hot topic and all always will be a hot topic with E commerce cause we are delivering something at least.

Quite looking forward to this conversation. Steve, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. Bern, how you doing?

Steve Orenstein

00:04:04.690 - 00:04:06.050

Good, Matt. Great to be here.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:06.770 - 00:04:20.410

And it's fair to say if those of you listening to the podcast, which is, I know the vast majority, like 99.9% of people listen to it, you won't see the fact that it is pitch black for Steve and that you are on the other side of the world.

Steve Orenstein

00:04:20.410 - 00:04:26.300

Right, that's it. It's just after 10:30 at night in Sydney. But yeah, great, great to be here.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:27.580 - 00:04:42.700

It's funny the different time zone things still, I still, I still can't get my head around how it works, especially when you fly from LA to New Zealand, that somehow you kind of miss a day of your life and I'm not quite sure how it works or.

Steve Orenstein

00:04:42.700 - 00:04:43.820

The other way you gain a day.

Matt Edmundson

00:04:44.140 - 00:04:51.580

Yeah, yeah. It's like, why did I do that? I don't know. I've just gone back in time. It's very, very peculiar. Do you travel to the States much?

Steve Orenstein

00:04:52.260 - 00:05:03.220

I do, yeah, definitely. In fact, all over. We've got a team actually in Manila and we've got a team in India. So definitely spend a little bit of time there.

And also to the US to meet with customers.

Matt Edmundson

00:05:03.460 - 00:05:06.820

Yeah, yeah. And so you're quite used to this time zone hopping thing.

Steve Orenstein

00:05:06.980 - 00:05:08.260

Yes, definitely.

Matt Edmundson

00:05:11.300 - 00:05:27.680

So Seb, we read there in your bio, Steve, that you dropped out of uni at 19, which is, it's not an unheard of story. Is it with anyone that's a little bit entrepreneurial.

But can I ask, what were you studying at uni and why it was so bad that you decided to drop out at night?

Steve Orenstein

00:05:27.760 - 00:06:06.770

Yeah, I started studying I. T. And so. And also was doing a business degree at the same time. So we're doing two degrees. Yeah.

And I guess what I started, I really wanted to run a business. I don't know why, but I just did.

And a lot of like, the software side of things that we were learning and even the programming that they were teaching was just quite out of date.

And so after doing that for a little while, you know, I had an opportunity to go and I just decided to pause it and go and work for someone and at that stage ended up taking over the business that I was, I was working in. And yeah, so I planned to go back, but never went back.

Matt Edmundson

00:06:07.410 - 00:06:27.560

Never went back. It's interesting, isn't it? It's. And why would you need to now? Right, so fast forward a few years and we have Locate to you.

So for those that maybe don't know what that is, listening to the show, just give a quick background on the company and then we're going to, we're going to jump into the whole conversation about delivery and ecom.

Steve Orenstein

00:06:27.880 - 00:08:21.760

Yeah, sure. So 2019, I started a business called Zoom to you and essentially it's Uber for delivery.

Based here in Australia, we operate in all the major capital cities providing a same day delivery experience designed for e commerce and retail businesses, but also for lots of other, you know, small businesses and consumers.

And so that business, you know, drivers have an app on their phone, they can choose to accept bookings as they come through, but the customer gets that live tracking experience so they can see when that delivery is actually arriving and also on the same day. And as we were building that business, what we found was a lot of companies were running their own fleet of their own drivers.

But we're wanting to use the technology that we'd built inside of the Zoom to you business. And so then we started building the Locate to you product and today we now sell that across the globe. We've got over 500 customers globally.

And that helps companies that are running their own fleet of their own drivers, allowing them to do things like route optimization, but also be able to send a live tracking link to their customer so the customer can see the live location of the driver arriving. And so I think when I started the business, it was all around making sure that you tell the customer when you're arriving.

And in most e Commerce stores today. Even when you go through the checkout process, the consumer never actually knows when that product's actually going to arrive.

And I think in the future that's got to change. And I think Amazon has done that pretty well in most parts of the world.

But most of the small, medium size e commerce businesses still at the point of checkout it's going to go through your typical postal networks or maybe a courier company, but the consumer never has an idea of when that's arriving and often they're not going to get that on the same day.

And yeah, we set about solving that and initially just in Australia with our network through Zoom to you, but now doing that on a global basis with our locate to you product.

Matt Edmundson

00:08:22.800 - 00:09:16.180

Well that sounds fascinating and let's jump in.

I mean you mentioned the e commerce business and you go through the checkout and it's still the biggest reason for car abandonment is things like hidden shipping fees or, or I don't know when it's going to arrive. It's not clear on the site. Right.

And I guess for a lot of entrepreneur, a lot of e commerce businesses, they're at the mercy of the couriers which they use. So you take our E comm brand for example. We distribute all over the world. So I've not got my own worldwide delivery network yet.

Maybe one day I'll compete with Amazon when we get bigger but I just don't have that. So I'm at the mercy in a lot of ways at I'm at the mercy of our couriers.

And so it's a little bit more complex to say this is exactly when it's going to arrive, right?

Steve Orenstein

00:09:16.180 - 00:09:55.200

Definitely, definitely. Yeah. And so I think it is, it's still complicated today and I think it's going to get simpler into the future.

But I think it's also dependent on different types of products and whether it's a retail store or whether certain types of product lines.

If you're selling a relatively low value item, it doesn't make sense that you're going to do like a fast delivery because the economics doesn't make sense.

But if you're selling a high value item then you can do a lot of smarter things around how you can actually do that delivery and having multiple carriers available at the point of checkout to choose, giving the customer choice as to which particular carrier that they're going to use and then being able to select something that's going to be faster.

Matt Edmundson

00:09:55.840 - 00:10:00.240

Yeah. And so what kind of things make sense then for same day delivery?

Steve Orenstein

00:10:02.000 - 00:12:14.720

I mean we see, I think it varies between different types of products.

But you know, I've seen great success even with, you know, some larger items like furniture, which, you know, high value value electronics, you know, mobile phones, all those types of things. But then, you know, you might have, you know, a florist and baked goods. Those all definitely make sense.

I think you know, any product that is over $50 and you're able to do, you know, able to get volume of that product. So if you're only selling one of those items a day, then it makes it harder to make same day delivery make sense.

But if you're able to put through decent amounts of volume and potentially it's also about restricting the delivery area that you're actually offering that from.

And so if you're running a retail store or even E commerce, you say, okay, well within a 10 kilometer radius of that particular location, then I'm going to be able to offer a same day service and you're going to batch them into areas. And I would always start by thinking about batching it into time windows.

Often people make the mistake of saying I'm going to turn on three hour delivery from the time of when that order arrives and have it delivered within three hours. And that's generally not going to be practical because you just don't know when those orders are all going to come in.

You're not going to be able to consolidate many orders together and you're not going to get the efficiencies around getting the price as low as you possibly can. Whereas if you batch it into windows then you know, okay, we're going to have three windows throughout the day.

You might start with one window, might match between six or nine o' clock at night. And then orders come in through the day.

The customer knows that at 9 o' clock, you know, before 9 o' clock they'll have that product delivered, they'll actually be at home, they've left work and then you can actually, you know, deliver it at a cost effective price.

One of the, I guess one of the biggest things that we see from E commerce businesses is around, you know, wanting to do faster delivery but wanting to do that cost effectively. And the way you do that is by batching those orders together.

And so it's typically the distance in how far that driver is having to travel is how much it's going to cost you.

And if you're able to give that driver 10, 20, 50 parcels in one go then and they're able to do that in a short period area and you can drive that cost to be, you know, sometimes as cheap as what you're doing with your local courier.

Matt Edmundson

00:12:16.160 - 00:13:06.180

It's interesting, isn't it? I mean I, I'm very aware that when it comes to E comm, the final mile is a big thing, right? The last mile they call it, don't they?

So you, especially if you're using like a national courier service, you know that what happens in that last mile is usually the most important critical. And what you're doing in effect is you're saying, well if, if you're selling those locally, why, why give it to someone else?

You can sort it out yourself and you can, you can get that to, to somebody's house. So what kind of number numbers start to make sense, Steve?

Because I get that if I'm doing baked goods, if I'm doing a florist, if I'm doing expensive electronics and I've got a good local market, you know, people are buying online and I'm delivering stuff. What sort of numbers makes sense. You talked about volume.

Steve Orenstein

00:13:07.220 - 00:14:23.800

Yeah, I mean I look at it in one way is that every ecommerce business spends a lot of money getting a customer to your site and then the delivery experience is generally poor and so you don't get that repeat order.

And so I think the way in which E commerce businesses should think about it is I want to provide a really great delivery experience, particularly for the people that are locally around me. And I'm going to get a whole bunch of word of mouth from that and I'm going to get a whole bunch of people coming back and repeat ordering.

Depending on the type of product you're selling. If you're selling a product that's just like a one off purchase, then probably not.

But if you are a product that people are going to keep on buying, then if you can make that delivery experience really good, then you're going to be able to drive volume.

And so it may mean in the, in the early days of starting this, you may lose some money in starting this out, but then you should be able to get to some scale where you make it, where it makes sense. And so I think even at 20 orders a day you can actually do this cost effectively.

And you might start with a smaller radius, you might just say you're going to only offer this within 5km, which means you're going to drive density and so the driver's not going to have to travel as far they can get all those deliveries done within a couple of hours. And you know, you've got this fixed cost to actually do that every single.

Matt Edmundson

00:14:23.800 - 00:15:10.880

Day of the week, that's really interesting. So five kilometers for our American listeners. About 3.5 miles, I'm guessing somewhere around there. Three, three, about that. Three.

About three, three, three and a half miles somewhere. Anyway, five clicks I think is the military term, isn't it? It's, it's a five click radius. So I mean this is really interesting, isn't it?

So if you're getting sort of 20, 30 local orders a day within a 5 kilometer, 5 click radius, 3 1/2 mile radius from your business, then actually you should probably start looking at something like same day delivery because you're going to deliver a much better service and the costs of it aren't too dissimilar to what you would have been paying anyway. Is that what I'm understanding?

Steve Orenstein

00:15:11.280 - 00:15:18.320

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And you know, with most career companies usually you're paying for multiple parcels.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:18.560 - 00:15:19.040

Yeah.

Steve Orenstein

00:15:19.520 - 00:15:36.800

And so there's a fee every time there's numerous parcels.

Whereas if you're just running your own fleet of your own drivers, you're probably paying maybe a per drop rate or you're paying an hourly rate for that particular contractor. And so you know, you're not paying extra for those additional parcels. So often it can be really cost effective.

Matt Edmundson

00:15:37.950 - 00:16:19.290

So how do you go about, I mean I get that if I'm listening to this thinking, actually for me, if I was in London, I can see straight away that this would make sense for us. We could do some kind of something in London, same day delivery, which would be really interesting.

But how would I go about finding, I mean maybe this is a silly question, but I'll ask it anyway because why not? How do I go about finding people that I am paying to deliver this service? Am I connecting with Uber drivers? Am I connecting with taxi drivers?

What's the sort of, the what things.

Steve Orenstein

00:16:19.290 - 00:17:52.100

I mean work there. Yeah, in any country, Every country, it's different.

But you know, the one thing that I is probably common across all of them is, you know, Facebook groups. Really good. Lots and lots of Uber Facebook groups and Uber driver like Facebook groups. So you can actually join those.

You can actually post something in there saying you're looking for a driver in this area and you'll get inundated. I'd suggest you put up a form of some sort or a link to a form where you can actually, I can fill out that information.

But yeah, generally getting drivers is now relatively easy. That's the easy part of our business in the zoom to you side of things.

Yeah, there's lots of different sites, you know, whether it's going on to, there's, you know, general recruitment sites. You can post jobs on there for drivers. It's, it's pretty easy to get drivers.

And so that's, I think that's the easy part and it's just finding, you know, good ones and it's probably thinking about, you know, what is the way of being able to identify what is a good driver or what's a, what's going to be a poor driver.

One of the things that we did inside of Zoom to you very early on is that we actually made it like, and we've got thousands of drivers on our Zoom to your platform.

We actually made the onboarding process complicated and we made them go through a series of steps, obviously, because it, it allowed us to identify whether or not the driver could follow instructions.

And if they could follow instructions, then they're going to be, you know, great at being able to deliver because that's what they have to do is, you know, follow instructions typically.

And whereas they couldn't follow the instructions and we knew that they couldn't quite understand things and we knew that we're probably going to have difficulties in them actually being a driver on, on the same TV platform.

Matt Edmundson

00:17:52.420 - 00:18:38.290

Yeah, that's really fascinating.

So just to clarify then, with the, the same day delivery service, if it's something that you're listening, you know, listening to this podcast and you're thinking, listener, I wonder if I could make this work in certain cities. This is not a case of getting my branded vans and drivers with my branded uniforms like ups.

This is a case of actually I'm going to tap into a network which is already there. These guys have already got cars, they're already used to delivering stuff.

I'm just going to go recruit them and they're going to use some technology like locate2u, they're going to have an app on there. And just like they do with an Uber job, I'm guessing, we as a company put out, we need this parcel taken from here to here.

And this is a route you're going to go down and you're going to drop all these parcels off. Who wants to do it?

Steve Orenstein

00:18:38.690 - 00:18:40.130

That's right. Exactly right.

Matt Edmundson

00:18:40.770 - 00:18:48.710

Okay, so, and this is, and this batching that you talk about is obviously a much better way than just doing it on a per job basis.

Steve Orenstein

00:18:49.350 - 00:19:25.120

Yeah, definitely.

So you definitely want to batch it because that's going to give you real efficiency and being able to, you know, just even doing the pick and pack you're going to know you've got these cutoff time windows when you can do that.

But then it means you've got the one or two or five drivers turning up and you're handing out these delivery runs to these drivers, say here's your batch of bookings to do is your route and they know it's the most efficient route. And so in the old days the drivers used to have to figure out which way they're going to do these deliveries.

And you know, you manually figure out which driver is going to do them. Now you don't have to do any of that. That technology handles all of that and allocate to your product does that really efficiently.

Matt Edmundson

00:19:25.760 - 00:19:36.480

That's fantastic. That's fantastic. So you said Steve, that was the easy part, getting the drivers, which means there's a not so easy part.

And I'm curious to know what the not so easy part is.

Steve Orenstein

00:19:37.600 - 00:20:34.220

I mean I think it's a change just to the way in which you're doing things.

And often I see conversations with the people that are running logistics inside of these e commerce businesses, particularly sort of medium to larger e commerce businesses probably don't want to do this because it's like they have to change their entire process for nick and pack. They have to prioritize these orders. They don't want to necessarily do this work.

And often where we've seen it being successful, it's been driven from the CEOs of these E commerce businesses who are like actually this is really important for our customers to have this and this is what's going to actually make our e commerce business be better than our competitors. And I think over the next five years it's going to be really important for E commerce businesses.

The ones that are going to be really successful, the ones that can have a really great delivery experience and that point of checkout is going to be really important to tell the customer when the product's arriving.

Matt Edmundson

00:20:36.770 - 00:20:54.050

Yeah. That's interesting. Is it? So can I. I get that it's going to be complex to put into my system and I'm. My brain's buzzing, Steve.

Right, so I've got a bunch of questions for you now. And I'm thinking of the questions are more like how. So I'm asking myself how would I, how would I implement this in my own ecom business?

Steve Orenstein

00:20:54.050 - 00:20:55.170

Right. Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:20:56.130 - 00:21:22.210

So my distribution, my pick and pack centers in Liverpool, we don't do.

We do some local deliveries in Liverpool, but I can't imagine that adding same day delivery to Liverpool postcodes is going to transform my business overnight. Just the nature of what we do.

Right, yeah, sure, I get that there are some businesses that might work, but if I could do it, like I say in London, well that's a different kettle official together. Now the last thing I want to do is go and set up a distribution centre in London, quite frankly.

Steve Orenstein

00:21:22.610 - 00:21:23.090

Yes.

Matt Edmundson

00:21:24.770 - 00:21:55.810

So have you seen it work where there's a two stage process where I say, right, actually all the orders today that have come in from London, rather than sending those out individually to clients, I'm going to put those in one big massive box and I'm going to send them down to the driver in London, whoever has agreed to do the job and I send them out. So I maybe send 20 parcels to this guy, 20 parcels to that guy and then they distribute them the sort of the final mile.

Steve Orenstein

00:21:55.970 - 00:21:57.410

Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.

Matt Edmundson

00:21:59.580 - 00:22:05.900

Am I creating a rod for my back, making it more complicated doing something like that or actually have you seen companies do that network?

Steve Orenstein

00:22:06.060 - 00:22:50.940

Well yeah, no, I've definitely seen that happen and it does create more complexity but ultimately it's like what's going to be better for your customer and is that going to result in, if you do this, you're going to have a better delivery experience, you have more control over it. Are you going to get more repeat customers?

And I think it varies depending on the type of product that you're selling and is it a product that does, you know, result in people purchasing it more often and is delivery going to make it better for that for your customer then then it makes complete sense to do something like that.

And so I think in that early days of setting that up, it's going to take a bit of work, it's going to take effort, you're going to have things that don't work quite well and you know, you might have some unreliable drivers but once you actually get it set up and going then it, then it just ticks along and then. Yeah, then it just becomes like second nature.

Matt Edmundson

00:22:51.420 - 00:22:56.110

Yeah, that's interesting. What happens if I go on you.

Steve Orenstein

00:22:56.830 - 00:23:26.650

Other thing I've seen is depending on the number of products that you actually have.

I've seen people where we've had, we've hired like storage locations, they've had padlocks on them that can be accessible by pin numbers and they've actually sent drivers in to do the pick and pack for them depending on the type of product that they're. They're shipping and you know, for it's a very simple product to actually grab off the shelf and and pack it away and deliver it.

So that way you can actually.

Matt Edmundson

00:23:27.370 - 00:23:42.610

That's genius. Yeah, yeah, that's genius. I like you could do that.

Especially if it's a smaller, I suppose, less expensive product that your, your drivers are less likely to go and rob. And I've got some way of changing that PIN code every night or something. You know, there's.

Steve Orenstein

00:23:42.610 - 00:24:05.500

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I mean when Covid happened, we did this for quite a few customers who wanted to set this up and particularly around even distribution of hand sanitizer. We basically set up these micro warehouses essentially out of these storage facilities.

It was the same product, there was a couple of different variations of it. Drivers would just go in there and do the pick and pack and deliver it to the customer.

Matt Edmundson

00:24:06.620 - 00:24:08.780

And do you find drivers are willing to do that?

Steve Orenstein

00:24:09.750 - 00:24:34.070

Yeah, I think it's. I think as long as they're being remunerated in a particular way, then drivers will. And particularly where it's consistent work.

You know, I think there is this large pool now of people that are driving for rideshare companies globally.

These guys are always guys and girls are always looking for additional ways of earning income and you know, they'll happily, you know, pick up this type of work.

Matt Edmundson

00:24:35.030 - 00:25:37.830

It's amazing, isn't it, what you're talking about, because one of the things which has been constantly plaguing us, I think as e commerce entrepreneurs the last few years is the rise of Amazon and their exceptional delivery service and how it is almost impossible to compete. But what you're talking about actually, if you can get it to work, is a way of competing with that because you're much smaller scale. Right.

You're doing what Amazon have done in the sense that you're putting these storage centers in locations around the UK and you're using in effect same day delivery service where Amazon. Sometimes I can get same day delivery in the uk, but it's not, it's not as much as I thought it would be actually.

It's still usually next day if you're a prime customer.

But what I see here is actually all of a sudden there's something quite global because I could set up a small storage facility and Sydney, if we had a business in Sydney.

Steve Orenstein

00:25:37.830 - 00:25:59.590

Right, Yep. Yeah. And so then you could start looking at your data and saying, okay, where are a lot of my orders happening? Which locations does it.

Where does it make sense? Yeah.

And you could, you know, if you're particularly doing international stuff, you could be holding stock in locations and maybe there's, there's cheaper ways of Being able to send it there and yeah, so may actually be more efficient in doing it.

Matt Edmundson

00:26:00.070 - 00:26:29.020

Yeah, that's really interesting.

I think it's a really fascinating idea of getting Uber drivers or whichever, you know, you know, I'm sure there are besides him, but getting Uber drivers to be part of your staff at a fixed rate where they pick and pack from where they are, which gives you.

It instantly gives you depots all around a specific country and if it makes sense for that city to then offer that same day delivery service, I think that's quite an interesting idea. Are there companies successfully doing this?

Steve Orenstein

00:26:30.940 - 00:27:29.590

I mean we see that with our business today, particularly in the Australian market and you know, lots of companies that are using the Zoom to you platform to do that. But also, you know, lots of our locate to you customers are doing it as well.

One of the things that we're quite close in being able to release, we know that getting started with something like this takes a bit of effort. We're actually providing an integration layer from locate two utilities that will connect you to different carriers essentially across the world.

And so it will plug into Uber's network, but it will also plug into DoorDash and many of these other sort of ride sharing companies that are now offering delivery. You can have your orders coming to locate to you and then it can actually send them out to the different carrier networks across the world.

And so you don't necessarily have to engage your own drivers. I think that's generally the best way you're going to get the best experience.

But if you've got overflow work you want to send out to them or you want to start in that way, that's also one way of being able to do that.

Matt Edmundson

00:27:30.070 - 00:27:32.990

Which just again reduces the barriers to entry in a sort of trial.

Steve Orenstein

00:27:32.990 - 00:27:33.990

Exactly, doesn't it?

Matt Edmundson

00:27:34.550 - 00:28:35.380

That's really fascinating. I suppose the other part of me is thinking actually if I was in the fulfillment game, so.

Well, technically I am, we do fulfillment from our warehouse for other companies, right. So we say, listen, give us your products, we'll ship them out for you, especially if they're small and products, we're pretty good at that.

And so we have customers that use us for fulfillment and we ship their products mainly in the uk, sometimes internationally as well.

And I'm really interested in this as a concept because if I could I then suppose say, right, I can think about this with my E commerce entrepreneur hat on, but I could also think about this with my entrepreneur hat on. Yeah, definitely.

And start building in effect these sort of mini fulfillment centers Especially around key cities like London would be an obvious one, maybe Edinburgh, Manchester and a few of these sort of places where you can then start to go, well, we can do same day delivery now.

Steve Orenstein

00:28:35.460 - 00:28:35.940

Yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:28:36.500 - 00:28:44.660

And then everything else is next day delivery, which would be a massive competition boost, I think.

Steve Orenstein

00:28:45.620 - 00:28:57.700

Yeah. For you, when you're consolidating orders from many companies, you know, that allows you to get more volume, it allows you to drive density as well.

And yeah, I think that definitely makes sense.

Matt Edmundson

00:28:58.340 - 00:30:13.680

Well, you know, on our, where our warehouse is, there's a unit on our warehouse estate, for want of a better expression, where we distribute from.

I don't know the name of the company because I think overnight basically trucks come into the compound and drop off parcels from just about every single delivery company, company out there from every. To, you know, whoever is particularly using them. And these guys, I think are the last mile.

They in effect doing this kind of thing where it's like they, they have, they must be hundreds of drivers picking up parcels, filling their cars with parcels and delivering them out.

And I think it'd be a really interesting experiment to do just to say, actually we can offer same day delivery across Liverpool and, and target that to. I don't know, I'm, I'm just thinking outside my box a little bit here, Steve. You've got me thinking now. You've got me thinking.

So it's really fascinating that now with technology that you can do this. So I guess is, is the technology prohibitive? Is it pretty reasonable? I mean, obviously you've got Locate Hue, but what sort of other tech do I need?

I'm kind of curious what the tech involvement is.

Steve Orenstein

00:30:14.720 - 00:32:13.540

So you're probably going to need. There's probably two main things.

One is something like locate to use or something that's going to do route optimization and that's going to be really important.

But the other thing you're going to need is something on the checkout process that is going to allow your customer to choose the different types of delivery options. And so, for example, on Shopify we have an app on there called Local Delivery.

And what that allows you to actually do is it allows the customer to actually select the point of checkout, the day they actually want the product to be delivered, and then the time window. And it will display that information based on the person's postcode or zip code.

And so in the background you've got a series of rules that says, okay, if on this particular day, on this zip code or postcode, we're actually offering a delivery time window, and these are the time windows and, and these are the numbers of orders that we will accept inside of this time window. And so you see, you're going to need a piece of software that's going to allow you to have that sort of customization at the point of checkout.

And so whether it's on Shopify or WooCommerce or any other E commerce platform, you'll need that part and that's the important part. And then that will communicate to the customer to say, hey, this is when your order is actually going to arrive.

And limiting the numbers of orders at the point of that time window is important because you typically don't have unlimited numbers of drivers. You're going to have a set a number of drivers, but you also want to be able to change that order number on certain days.

So you know, if you're a florist and you're doing Valentine's Day, you want to be able to spike that on Valentine's Day. And you would pre plan the number of drivers you need at those types of things. And so that's, you know, relatively simple to do.

You know, the local Delivery software costs $20 a month. So it's, you know, it's very inexpensive. And then, yeah, then you'll need the route optimization. Again, that's not that expensive either.

It's usually on a per driver base and varies in cost, but somewhere between sort of 30 to 50, $50 a month per user, thereabouts.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:13.780 - 00:32:16.580

Right. So again, not cost prohibitive at all.

Steve Orenstein

00:32:16.820 - 00:32:17.220

No.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:18.980 - 00:32:20.740

It'S all straightforward stuff.

Steve Orenstein

00:32:20.740 - 00:32:47.150

Yeah, I mean what we've seen now over the last five years in particular is that there are products out there that are available to assist companies in being able to do this. And it's really around E commerce businesses figuring out how this is going to work with their business and, and wanting to make that change.

And there is effort involved in making this change. But then you know, I think the return on investment is the time, but also the money is, you get a return very, very quickly.

Matt Edmundson

00:32:48.030 - 00:33:15.240

And do you find then that if I, if I, if I'm going to go to the trouble of investing in the tech, which from a monetary point of view is not the, is not the monthly cost, it's just the upheaval, I suppose, to the site and the tech team getting it all set up. It's the change in process, isn't it, with the, with the pick and pack team. So you know how orders come through.

And so, so there's, there's a little bit of thinking. I guess for each company to, to sort of go through.

Steve Orenstein

00:33:15.240 - 00:33:16.640

Definitely, definitely.

Matt Edmundson

00:33:17.760 - 00:33:40.690

And if I, if I go to the expensive doing that, how do you, how do you remunerate the drivers? What, maybe that's, how long is a piece of string. But how does, how does it work for the driver? How do they get paid for what they do?

What sort of cost do I need to have in my head for that?

Steve Orenstein

00:33:41.330 - 00:35:15.040

Yeah, it varies depending on like the product that you're delivering, but also the distance and how far that driver is traveling.

But typically, you know, the simplest way I would be thinking about it is go into, you know, your ride sharing app, type in one location to another location.

It will tell you how much it's going to cost and that, you know, globally, it will tell you that that will give you a sense of, okay, that's the cost on a per distance basis. Whether it's kilometer or per mile basis, you can work that out.

And so if you think about that and you think about, okay, well if a driver's got to travel, you know, 50 kilometers or 50 miles on a particular day, this is what it's going to cost them to do that. And if he's doing that many deliveries inside of that radius, then you can work out what that cost cost can look like.

Now you want to have a cost every time that driver's got to stop and get out of his vehicle. There's time associated in doing that. And so you want to have some money that's available to pay for that, that time period.

And so you generally want to be able to work out, you know, it's a fee per delivery and that that's generally going to be the best way of being able to do it. And you know, I've seen that where it's yeah, it can be as cheap as, you know, in our market.

You know, I've seen it as five, six, seven dollars a delivery where a driver's delivering 60, 70 parcels in one go. Where it's other e commerce businesses has been at 15 to 20, sometimes $25 a delivery.

But yeah, and it varies in every market because you know, every country obviously the wages are going to be different.

Matt Edmundson

00:35:16.210 - 00:35:31.250

So again, if you do like same day delivery or this sort of local delivery, is that something that I as the E commerce entrepreneur would then charge a fee for to clients or is that happening?

Steve Orenstein

00:35:32.290 - 00:36:29.350

Yeah, typically. And so what you would do is you would, your price per delivery may vary than what you're incurring.

You would generally fix that cost to your customer and then you would know that you've got enough margin to make sure that, you know, hopefully you should be receiving more orders because you're giving more certainty of when this product's arriving. But you know, we've seen it work.

You know, one of our customers is Nespresso and at that point of checkout they've got a number of different options that are available.

They've got the postal network that's available but if you want it faster, you've got these two options that are available and it's, you know, whether it's in within a three hour time window or whether it's, you know, later on in the evening delivery.

And so I think it's giving those customers flexibility and knowing you've got, you know, your pricing is set so that you're going to cover that cost or you may lose some but then you're going to gain it because you're going to receive more orders from your customers by having that option available.

Matt Edmundson

00:36:30.390 - 00:36:35.670

Yeah, and I guess it's one of those things you'll experiment with, isn't it? And you'll tweak it and figure it out as you go along.

Steve Orenstein

00:36:37.030 - 00:37:00.310

And I think, you know, if you think about most businesses are spending so much money on advertising to try and get customers and so I would think about it in a point of view of like just take some money and some budget, put it aside and you know, even if you're going to lose money on all these deliveries, just think about it as a marketing expense because you're probably going to find you're going to get more customers by doing this.

Matt Edmundson

00:37:00.950 - 00:37:14.070

Yeah, yeah, no, totally. It's a really interesting idea and I think it cannot be overstated how well a good delivery experience brings a customer back.

Steve Orenstein

00:37:14.630 - 00:37:15.190

Definitely.

Matt Edmundson

00:37:15.430 - 00:37:20.070

And how quickly a bad delivery experience will get a customer to shop elsewhere.

Steve Orenstein

00:37:20.070 - 00:37:21.350

Yeah, yeah, right, definitely.

Matt Edmundson

00:37:22.310 - 00:37:27.230

It's one of those things that's usually added outside of your control. So you say one of your clients then is.

Steve Orenstein

00:37:27.230 - 00:37:43.120

And I think, I think actually just you just said something interesting.

Is like most E commerce businesses just think it's the courier fault and they leave it and they think they can't solve this problem and they blame the courier. But I think it's actually the E commerce owner can have control over this. It's just a matter of setting something up.

Matt Edmundson

00:37:44.160 - 00:38:50.510

Yeah, it is, isn't it? It's just a matter of figuring out how you can, how you can do it based on where your customers are. Not.

I like it because the concept, the tech, the ideas give you possibilities. Whereas and this is one of the things I love about E Com and technology. It's sort of leveled the playing field, hasn't it really?

Because in England we were stuck with the Royal Mail Service for the longest time and then different couriers came along and some of them were as bad and some of them were worse. You know, just it was what it was.

And one of them very famously just went, well, let's just change our name and it will con everybody into thinking we're brilliant again. British public went, are you mad? So you know, we've still got the courier services.

Then Amazon came in and one of the interesting things with Amazon and you see it a little, I saw it a little bit in Australia as well actually.

When Amazon came in, the delivery system, which wasn't great at that point in terms of its speed, has to catch up and has to become efficient because Amazon know what they're doing, right?

Steve Orenstein

00:38:50.910 - 00:38:51.230

Yes.

Matt Edmundson

00:38:52.830 - 00:39:38.730

And you do see this effect wherever Amazon go a few years later, the delivery networks seem to be, well, they seem to be a little bit better wherever they're at. And so I do think this is one of those things which is constantly changing. But the fact now that you can actually start to have your. You can think.

There's a number of things that I never thought you would be able to do. Number one, I didn't realize I'd ever be able to set up my own bank. Apparently currently I can the bank of Matt.

If you want to give me your money, no problem.

And I can now set up my own Hawley, you know, delivery company and use a pre existing network and plug into that in a way that actually is quite clever, I think. And I love that, I love that about technology, I love that about innovation and where we're at at the moment.

Steve Orenstein

00:39:38.730 - 00:39:39.130

Yeah, yeah.

Matt Edmundson

00:39:39.130 - 00:40:35.440

Definitely keeps it all exciting, doesn't it? If you're an E commerce entrepreneur, it's like.

And in fact I imagine now, I mean we're having this conversation in the office because I every now and again I just go, I think we should set up a new E commerce business because again, that's just my nature and I'm like thinking about an E commerce business.

But what you're in effect talking about now is actually how could I do something in E commerce that's hyper localized and offer a delivery service that is unparalleled and unmatched? That would be a really interesting thought experiment, wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it really would. It really would.

So you mentioned Nespresso and other clients like that. How does it Work with them.

Do they send you individual parcels and you sort them out and give them to drivers or do they just use your software and have drivers come to their warehouse or do you like pick and pack for them? I'm curious how you do it with other retail companies.

Steve Orenstein

00:40:36.720 - 00:41:22.900

Nespresso is a really good example here in Australia they, they actually, they've got lots of retail stores across the, and they use those as micro warehouses and so they draw a radius from that, that retail store and so within that radius as the person actually goes through the, the checkout process they're entering their details of address information and as they're doing that it then shows them the list of delivery options.

And so if it's an order that's for same day delivery that will go to the retail store they would do the pick and package driver would turn up there and pick that up and that's generally, it's typically time windowed and so the retail store knows okay, the driver's going to be picking you know, these five orders up in this time window to actually be delivered. And yeah, it works, works really well.

Matt Edmundson

00:41:23.620 - 00:42:19.160

That's really interesting.

I'm just thinking about, we used to do beauty, I saw the beauty business about 18 months ago but one of the things that you like a lot of the beauty brands here in the UK they have salons that sell their products and so actually they could do in effect the same thing, couldn't they?

It's like yeah, we can offer same day delivery on these products and, and actually you could do that probably around the, around the country, certainly postcode areas. You know, that'd be a really interesting experiment to do.

I wonder how long it will be before they start knocking on your door and going oh, I heard Matt say that I could do this. That's really interesting. Well Steve, listen, you've got my brain pondering now and racing with ideas.

What else in this industry is happening at the moment that we should be thinking of as e commerce entrepreneurs? What else should we be thinking about?

Steve Orenstein

00:42:20.920 - 00:43:07.020

I think it's interesting to think about the likes of ChatGPT and the impact that's going to have.

I think particularly customer service wise being able to respond to customers much faster using tools like Chat GPT particularly I think, you know, not necessarily, not now but I, I would imagine over the next six to 12 months watching what's happening in the AI space I think is going to be really important because I think the early adopters of that are going to, are going to really accelerate their customer experience. Yeah, so I think a lot's happening there. Yeah.

And I think, you know, I think delivery now is going to be what sort of really, you know, makes different E commerce businesses really grow, grow and you know, excel from their competitors.

Matt Edmundson

00:43:07.420 - 00:43:24.950

Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think it's going to be one of the standout things. And so this has been a really eye opening conversation, Steven.

So if people listening want to find out more, if they want to reach out, if they want to find out more about, about locate2 you, what's the best way to do that?

Steve Orenstein

00:43:25.510 - 00:43:51.590

Yeah, I mean you can to funny. You can head on to our website which is Locate to you dot com. It's the, the number two and the letter U.

If you wanted to reach out to me directly you can just grab me on LinkedIn. Just searching Steve Orenstein. I'm also on Tik Tok. You can grab me on there as well and, and on YouTube.

So yeah, happy to connect and yeah, always happy to chat and have, you know, provide any advice anyone's looking for and thinking about doing this for their business.

Matt Edmundson

00:43:52.310 - 00:45:08.410

That's fantastic. So do check out locatetoyou.com, locate the number 2 and the letter U. We will of course link to all of that in the show notes.

Steve, Let me close with my final question if I may. It's a question I've started asking a lot of people. I'm just really curious with the answer. So this show is sponsored by E Commerce Cohort.

E Commerce Cohort is like a monthly mastermind coaching program that we run which is, I just love it. It's great. Got some amazing people in there.

It's all digital of course, but imagine you're speaking to a room, a genuine room full of cohort members who are keen and eager to learn from you and your expertise.

So you've just done this keynote speech on how to set up same day delivery, be hyper localized and absolutely kill it and trash Amazon in the process. That'd be a great webinar title by the way. And you've done that webinar and you know the crowd's going wild. Go Steve.

And you get to do that thing they do at the Oscars which is, you know, that sort of speech which says I would just like to thank who would you.

Who's had a big influence on you, past or present, on your business, how you see things at the moment that you would sort of bring into that list and why.

Steve Orenstein

00:45:09.610 - 00:45:11.690

Oh that's a, that's a big question.

Matt Edmundson

00:45:13.210 - 00:45:17.050

And a big one. That's what I say, yeah, I mean.

Steve Orenstein

00:45:17.050 - 00:46:13.870

I think, you know, over the years I've had lots of different people that have been involved in, you know, providing advice and mentoring me, you know, at all. All different stages.

Yeah, I mean, I couldn't name someone specifically because there's been, I guess there's been so many different people that have provided lots of advice along the way. It's a good question.

But I mean, you know, I really think also I've, I've built, you know, a number of different businesses and I've got two businesses running at the moment, both Zoom to you and Locate to you. And ultimately it's, it's the teams inside of those businesses that do a lot of that work.

And I've got, yeah, a really great team across the, across both of our businesses who, you know, work really hard on delivering a really great solution to our customers.

I think, you know, we, without having a really great team and having those people that believe in the vision of what we're trying to deliver, you don't have a business. And so, yeah, I'd have to say the team that we've got, yeah, really, really helps our businesses grow.

Matt Edmundson

00:46:14.590 - 00:47:08.280

Fantastic. That's a good answer. The team that makes a dream work. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Steve, listen, thanks for coming on the show, man, and it's been a really interesting conversation and like I say, lots and lots of food for thought. I am checking out locate you. I'm going to check out the website.

I'm going to be talking to the team about same day delivery services, whether it's going to make sense for us. But I'm curious to see whether we can implement this in our fulfillment services in a few places around the country.

That would be a really interesting thought experiment and I'm really intrigued to see whether I can create a hyper localized E commerce business. That would be a really fun experiment. So watch this space. But listen, Steve, thanks for coming on.

Thanks for sparking the old gray matter and getting me thinking about it. It's been an absolute pleasure, man. Genuinely good.

Steve Orenstein

00:47:08.600 - 00:47:10.120

No problems at all. Thanks, Matt.

Matt Edmundson

00:47:10.280 - 00:48:57.130

Awesome. Well, thanks Steve, for joining me. And also a big shout out to today's show sponsor, the E Commerce cohort.

Remember to check out their free training online at E Commerce.

Also, be sure to follow the ecommerce podcast wherever you get your podcasts from because we have yet more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them. And before I wrap up today's episode, let me just take a quick moment to invite you, dear listener, to become a part of the show.

If you are an E commerce entrepreneur or an expert and would like to share your insights with our audience audience, we would love to hear from you. Or if you know someone who would make a great guest just like Steve, then please send them our way.

Just head over to the website www.ecommercepodcast.net and all the information is there. And in case no one has told you yet, today, you are awesome. Yes you are. It's just a burden you have to bear. Steve has to bear it. I have to bear it.

You've got to bear it as well. Now the E Commerce Podcast is produced by Orion Media. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.

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I will see you next time. Bye for now.

Steve Orenstein

00:49:03.710 - 00:49:03.950

It.