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How to ensure your workforce can help you keep your rapid delivery promise

In a whirlwind two years quick commerce (QCommerce) has exploded into the grocery world with a host of highly funded start-ups racing to secure market share in the lucrative space.

Whilst Getir has become the elder statesman of on-demand grocery (having launched in 2015), more recently the likes of Gorillas, Dija and Fancy (acquired by GoPuff), Jiffy, Weezy and Zapp have all emerged and are jostling for position.

As a core part of the investor proposition, many of these companies pitched their ability to own the value-chain end-to-end. In other words, they could capture the order, run the fulfilment hubs and deploy the workforce, all on proprietary software.

For the most part they’ve done an incredible job. Without preferring any one of them over the other, I can say that my last 3 orders arrived in 6, 6 and 7 minutes respectively. A pretty amazing customer experience!

However, with increased competition for the workforce and deteriorating weather, many such businesses are discovering that there are 20-30% of orders that cannot be effectively handled with the hourly shift booking system used by most of the industry.

How do you respond within 10 minutes to spikes in demand when you’re already at capacity? How do you manage drop outs in real time? What happens when you have large scale cancellations because of bad weather?

At Ryde, we’re really excited to be offering a white labelled solution to this sector that enables a grocery delivery business to retain it’s brand integrity whilst accessing real time solutions to real time problems.

We believe that the ideal workforce balance for a last-mile grocery delivery business is a combination of hourly scheduled internal workforce + hourly scheduled external workforce + an API integration for on-demand delivery spikes.

By integrating with the Ryde platform a grocer can brand the experience end to end to ensure for example that any tracking links received by end customers are consistent with the company’s brand.

Ryde has a workforce of thousands of on-demand couriers constantly looking for work. By integrating proprietary software with the Ryde API, you can send live orders in real time to a live workforce operating in your geographic location. This means that in practice a grocery delivery business could accept an order whilst it’s internal team is at capacity, push the order to the Ryde platform and fulfil it in a matter of minutes. Ensuring that even when business peaks unexpectedly, the rapid delivery promise is always kept. And the brand identity stays consistent.

We are finding today that we are increasingly in conversations with these dynamic businesses, many of whom are looking for a competitive advantage alongside a way to increase their customer stickiness.

At Ryde we’ve already begun enabling the first of these players to more effectively blend an internal/external workforce. We’re excited to be at the forefront of combining instant delivery with green urban solutions.