Collect & Deliver?
Business Ideas April 25th, 2007I used to use Internet Shopping for my grocery shop when I couldn’t drive, a disabled family member also uses it a lot. My question is how far could services like this go?
We both work fulltime, and having met up after work on Thursday the dry-cleaners where we were doing our shopping was shut - she has a priority card for them to get the cleaning done quickly, but what use is that when they are shut?
I managed to finish work early on the Friday and drop it in, and I was pleasantly surprised when the assistant said, “Oh it will be ready on Sunday!”, wow that’s service!
Normally a Sunday collection would be fine, but we were away for the weekend and got back before the early Sunday closing time. Monday we worked until after they were closed, Tuesday we were both off work but had a string of appointments and completely forgot, so here it’s Wednesday and we still haven’t collected the dry cleaning!
Supermarkets have moved into the late night and 24 hour arena in recent times, which is great when you want to go shopping late, or go shopping at 4am! But what about other things?
I’d be interested to see the pricing of a shop/service that was only open in the late afternoon evenings (say 4pm - 10pm) that would do the following:
- Drop things off to the correct people during office hours (whether that be Dry Cleaning to the Cleaners, or my eBay parcel to the other side of the world, to the Post Office).
- Allow me to have my Post Office parcels and packets delivered to them and them sign for them because our collection office closes at 2pm (I know they open at 5am but that’s not the point, I want the packet that evening).
There’s probably a multitude of other things they could do as the business grew (couriering as they’d be on the road locally anyway etc.), initially I think it would make a loss, they’d be costing petrol for just a few people’s items probably all to different places. But you’d probably want to play a volume game, you’re only going to have to go to the post office once in a day whether you have 2 parcels from the evening before or 50! The same with the dry cleaners.
Does anyone have any other ideas for what a service like this could involve, or indeed know of one and the pricing structure?
April 26th, 2007 at 8:55 am
This would be a very interesting idea, sort of a left luggage for parcels. You’d need some way that you could work out who a parcel was for when it turned up, as you could have more than one Fred Blogs, but other than that would be easy enough to do.
I would imagine you’d get people to register for a small fee, say £9.99 then you could email them when the parcel arrived and then charge say £4.99 every time they used the service.
Costs would be some IT systems to track what came in etc and to email the customers. Then a industrial unit and some staffing - which could be cheap if you’ve got good IT as they won’t need to be that clever.
Bit of promo and PR, and that would be it really.
Sounds a good idea, I like it.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:07 am
You could use that pricing structure as a “Pay as You Go” type pricing model, and then have monthly subscription models?
If you’re an eBay fanatic all those missed parcels and trips to the post office (at funny times) can cost you in both time and petrol!
If you were allowing them to post parcels and collect your dry cleaning I would expect either a bill at the end of the month, or to “top-up” an account in advance (that may require a bit of IT?).
I’d possibly build up my model on the basis of different things, the things I do reguarly like post office at one lower price (as I know lots of people may use the service), but if I have to go and collect a special widget from a special shop I’d want a “custom price” for a “custom job”?