Delivery in 2021: Three trends to reshape our business

No corner of our daily life was untouched by the pandemic. From grocery shopping, food ordering to medicine consumption, people have opted for delivery to their doorsteps quickly and safely. At Pickupp, the number of delivery agents has grown by 500% since the pandemic to catch up on the call from consumers and businesses. It is beyond question that with online shopping as the new habit, consumers will only have higher expectations of the delivery experience - more efficient, diversified, and seamless. No doubt that more players are joining the battlefield but how will delivery services reshape our life in 2021?

Staying at home is no stranger to everyone in 2020, a theme that would continue into the first half of 2021. With customers rarely venturing out for food, delivery in the city has never been more important to grocery shops and F&B outlets. Merchants need to manage an influx of orders and get them delivered on time, but traffic could cause delay at rush hours. Needless to say, customers may place multiple orders from different stores within the district as they crave for one-stop for all, wishing to receive their products on the next day or even same day delivery. On this account, walkers (agents who deliver goods on foot) are the promising solution for an efficient and smooth delivery experience at any time. In Hong Kong, 72% of our delivery agents are walkers. They are the Jedi of Pickupp, guarding local districts and guaranteeing a speedy and quality delivery service. When orders scale in a short time, merchants can rely on walkers to deliver within their dedicated area because they are more mobile and flexible without any concerns over parking their motorbikes or vans. It is especially true for boutique deliveries in areas like mid-levels that walkers are outperforming other delivery agents on the whole. Walkers at Pickupp can ramp up merchants’ delivery capacity 5x at any given time of the year, preventing bottlenecks during demand spikes, at the same time saving up to 33% in delivery costs. Merchants no longer need to worry about logistics and are well-positioned to take as many orders as they can, driving sales and revenue.

Established retailers have learned a lesson from the pandemic that e-commerce will become a necessity. And speed is the secret sauce for winning in the battle of online commerce, from the stage of adjusting the strategy to delivering the products and services with quality. Look at the successful examples – they adopted digital solutions quickly to ensure a smooth shopping experience. Rosewood Hong Kong offered online orders of their gourmet and fine dining during the festive seasons last year. By working with Pickupp, customers of Rosewood Hong Kong were able to enjoy the luxury experience at home which would be hard to imagine just a year ago. Prolonged delivery is intolerable especially when your business aspires to expand overseas. Sussing out international and local logistics on your own could cause opportunity costs and miss the best timing to take the market. As such, working with the right delivery partner who is the truly dedicated expert will enable you to focus on business growth, instead of racking one’s brain to reply to complaints on poor delivery experience.

During the pandemic, everyone needs to practice social distancing. Despite the fact of fewer footfalls, people still miss the way they interact offline. However, for business models rooted online or campaigns run virtually, offline experience is often the time only of secondary consideration. Businesses will miss hundreds of millions revenue if they fail to respond to the default demand - a seamless shopping experience across online and offline. The year of 2020 was not easy on large-scale physical events like the Hong Kong Wine & Dine Festival, propelling them to move online for marketing and sales. While the event and numerous wine tastings were staged online, the truth was that consumers expected to receive the products as soon as possible as if they were shopping on-site. However, what if you don’t have enough stock in the warehouse, or you don’t have sufficient manpower to deliver the orders on time? These issues need to be figured out beforehand with a flexible logistics solution, from first-mile to last-mile. With the right logistic strategy and delivery partner in place, the Hong Kong Wine & Dine Festival enabled numerous orders right to people’s doors with no hiccups, which also set the benchmark of upcoming online festivals 2020 has led to a monumental shift in the importance of delivery to people’s daily life, and consequently to business success. We will only see increasing attachment of customers to delivery services in 2021 and beyond. It’s never too late to start planning for the logistics. Whether it’s large, established companies, SMEs, or even small online businesses, they must get ready for the ever-changing market by putting delivery at the heart of their business planning. Published on HKEJ - Delivery in 2021: Three trends to reshape our business Read More：Hong Kong logistics tech startup Pickupp secures Series A funding for APAC expansion Read More：The Future of Retail Relies on Smart Logistics