Doddle COO advises on avoiding delivery delays

Retailers and couriers got something of a bloody nose last Christmas, with delivery patterns unexpectedly lurching towards an early discount-led peak on Black Friday that caught companies out. Add this to fierce competition leading to often ridiculously low rates and it was unsurprising that some companies, most notably City Link, didn’t make it.

Retailers and couriers are now working hard to add resilience to their offerings and part of this is bringing third party Click & Collect firms increasingly to bear. Indeed Doddle and heavily investing courier DPD recently announced that DPD will use Doddle locations as part of its Pickup option, which will complement its mainstay home delivery offering.

Doddle COO Peter Louden says: “Retailers [and couriers] are trying to put together a suite of solutions to spread capacity to cope with Peak 2015. We’re part of that continuum, we don’t profess to be an answer to every delivery problem.

“Peak tends to make your reputation. if you are smooth and efficient you cement your reputation for the long term. Retailers will see efficiency gains and service benefits with our contribution to their Peak 2015 effort.”

Doddle offers product collection to eCommerce customers, primarily in railway stations (Network Rail has a share of ownership) but increasingly in other locations also, such as on universities and despite the deal with DPD is carrier agnostic.

Peter explains: “[When we launched] final mile problems were emerging and have greatly accelerated since. This is letting the rest of the online shopping experience down.

“We decided to look at locations where you had high footfall and a regularity of habit. People generally pass that point a couple of times a day. 

“We also offer much larger store capacity compared convenience stores, and it’s more convenient than in-store Click & Collect where it’s accessing a backroom on the third floor, for example.”

A new sort of warehouse

The Doddle stores, expected to number around 100 by the end of the year, are helping to redefine the warehouse.

Peter says: “Each of our shops is a small, shared-user warehouse in its own right. It has normal goods-in processes, shelving etc, that allow us to receive parcels from all carriers.

“Typically a store will take 10-12 deliveries a day from all the major UK carriers. Within an average of four minutes we have a product on the shelf.”

The sites are typically 1,000-2,500 sq ft and can house on average 1,500-2,500 parcels. A convenience store will house 10-20 parcels.

“We started off with rudimentary shelving, and some location dividers so, for example, smaller fashion items do not occupy a separate shelf location. Its relatively flexible to allow us to re-configure as needed, we’ve also got some hanging locations and bins… we’re as geeky about storage as any mainstream warehouse,” he explains.

The average product weight is around 3kg but Doddle will store up to 16kg and the size of a microwave oven.

{EMBED(599439)}

“We can go up to 2.5m storage, but sometimes the benefit of going higher is counteracted by the space needed to store equipment needed to lift and handle at that height. There is an equation that has to be balanced.”

Doddle built its business model on an assumption that consumers would take two and a half days on average to come and collect items. The company has been pleasantly surprised by how readily people come to pick up their goods.

“People generally pick up in less than a day,” says Peter. “We even have people who pick up within minutes, such is the immediacy of communication these days. It is crucial to have speed of turn-through and we’ve been surprised by this.”

Doddle claims to have a very competitive pricing model. This is often embedded by the courier or retailer into the product price. Doddle also offers consumers unlimited use membership for £5 per month.

It’s not just about deliveries, Doddle has a returns offering for partner retailers. Peter explains: “With ASOS, for example, when a customer walks in with an item, they don’t even need a returns note, they just need the original code. We pack it and despatch to ASOS and give the customer a paper or electronic receipt.

“One of the smart things is we consolidate the items into an outer so we save ASOS money by giving their good-in department a cleaner product to handle and re-assimilate into the sales operation.”

On this evidence, Click & Collect is developing into an increasingly sophisticated and scalable piece in the puzzle of UK eCommerce deliveries and returns.