The last 10 steps

In the week before Christmas, houses around the world are inundated with ‘Sorry we missed you’ delivery notes from couriers. So if you’re wondering why on-line retail still only represents 10% of sales in the USA and around 6.9% in Australia, it’s because the real problem isn’t the last mile, it’s the last 10 steps.

What is the last 10 steps? I’m defining it as the space between where the delivery van stops out front of the final destination, to getting the package inside. It’s estimated that more than 20% of deliveries do not get made on the first attempt. This comes at a massive cost to couriers, and ultimately us. And this is before we consider the horror of having to go into a post office pick up the package. Which is much worse than shopping –  so annoying.

While we have access to most everything via ecommerce these days, our houses need an upgrade to cope. Yep, our houses have been upgraded many times as new technologies arrived. We’ve added electricity, indoor plumbing, automated heating, and even driveways are a little over 100 years ago. Unfortunately our letter boxes haven’t had an upgrade in about 250 years – and we need one. The early attempts to solve this problem are lets just say, sub-optimal. Giving Amazon a key for couriers to unlock my door? No thanks. A  locker outside a petrol station brought to you by postal services around the world? Hmm, that seems like a company not trying very hard. Quite frankly I can’t believe a Mac Daddy Delivery Box hasn’t entered the home market yet.

So what would one of these puppies look like? Here’s the Sammatron version of the Mac Daddy Delivery Box to avoid our Christmas ecommerce woes in 2019:

The Mac Daddy Delivery Box – Some of the features I’d put into it:

  • It would have 3 sections: Dry, Fridge and Frozen – so it could take all deliveries.
  • It would probably be a as big as a fridge.
  • It would be underground and have a button for the courier to press and it rises up on demand to take the delivery.
  • When a delivery arrives the owner would get a call and see live video footage of who is delivering the item and potentially check their ID.
  • The delivery unit would only open via the owners smart phone.
  • It would have near field communication readers (RFID) and image recognition cameras to detect the delivery is correct and as ordered.
  • All data of deliveries would be owned by the person who owns the MDDB (Mac Daddy Delivery Box) so they could sell that information to companies if they choose, for their own profit.
  • The MDDB would aggregate data and give reports of who, what and when back to the owner to track their spending.
  • It would be secure like a safe, so that items of high value could be delivered safely.
  • It would be electric, and solar powered.
  • It would make your friends envious and totally want one.
  • Optional Extra: two small palm trees above the underground delivery unit – so that when a delivery arrives it looks like the Thunderbirds secret cave coming out of the ground!

This type of delivery unit seems inevitable to me. It’s not if, but who and when. And if it isn’t done by mid 2019, then I’ll do it myself in my House of the Future project. Until then, you might just choose a glitter bomb to entertain you in the interim.

 

🎄Have a great Christmas, Steve. 

 

Retail Apathy: Target

On the weekend I went into a Target store to purchase an Esky for a pitch presentation I was doing where the reference was brands becoming generic terms for a product. Rather than walk around a giant retail floor, I thought I’d ask a staff member where I might be able to find one. I approached a staff member and asked. He was friendly and attentive. He almost cared and he said:

“To be honest, that is a seasonal line. I know we have them in summer, but I’m pretty sure we don’t carry any stock in winter. But, to be sure let me check.”

He then reached for his internal walkie talky and spoke with a colleague.

“Yeh, like I said we don’t have them this time of year. Sorry man, maybe try Bunnings.”

So while he was civil, approachable and nice he didn’t solve my problem. He didn’t even offer to to walk to me to where these items would be on the shelf during the warm season. (He was very busy fixing a shelf) He suggested I go to a competitor, which can be a valid customer service response, but certainly was not on this occasion and here is why:

I didn’t believe what he told me. In my 40 years I’ve been in enough department stores and discount retailers to know I’ve seen them ‘out of season’. I know enough about how poor Australian retailers are at selling excess stock to think there might just be a few left overs. I’ve also had enough retail staff give me false information over the years to test my intuition and have a look around for myself. So I did that and below is a picture of what I found. A wall of Esky type chillers.

Esky

And they got my sale, despite their retail apathy.

But it’s a pretty bad situation when the customers know more about a retail store than the people who work there. It got me thinking about how many times this must happen through the entire store. How many customers are sent away, told an item is not in stock, or don’t even know what product the customer is asking for? Multiply this by 305 retail stores, 10,000 items in store and thousands of uninformed, uninspired staff and it is hard to see this type of retailer competing with on-line options. How can a staff member even know what’s in store as well as a search engine can on line? They simply cannot.

For retailer to survive the transition to online the first step is for them to realise that it’s actually not about product and price point. It’s primary about the experience and how much the people that serve customers actually care. Both of which are deliberate strategies that are not born at store level.

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New on line supermarket

I’m developing a new website which is an on-line supermarket. Here’s some of the features I’ll be building into it in terms of usability.

If you want to place an order for milk, you must first look at all the items you don’t want to buy. They will pop up on the screen one by one. You’ll have to click past all of them. Then the milk will pop up after you’ve seen every other product for sale to click on. But after this, you then must click past all of the goods for sale again. The same ones we already showed you. When you want to proceed to the checkout, we’ll make you wait for maybe 5 or more minutes and show you many of the items you already saw on screen, again, just in case you changed your mind. If you decide to shop late at night at our on line supermarket, only one person can buy at a time, because we will restrict our ‘server’ so that all of our customers cannot buy their supermarket items simultaneously. This is because we will be trying to save a few dollars on serving people. A few people might leave and go somewhere else, but it will be a great expense saving idea.

Sounds pretty ridiculous right? Well, this is defined as ‘retail strategy’ in the physical supermarket world. Maybe it’s time they re-thought how they do some things. Right now there is tremendous opportunity for smart startups in the retail space employ on-line usability best practice to show some dinosaurs how it’s done.

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