Retailers looking to offer customers affordable and fast same-day delivery will welcome the arrival of Go People, which plans to disrupt the traditional delivery model.
Founded by Wayne Wang, its GoSHIFT service is currently being piloted by around a dozen retailers, most of them florists, and is set to go live on July 1.
“GoSHIFT is ideal for businesses looking to compete with large-scale retailers who dominate the market, such as Amazon, while minimising the costs associated with managing their own delivery services,” says Wang.
Just like Uber, it relies on a crowd-sourced business model, using shift-based, dedicated drivers or Runners to meet increasing customer demands for same-day delivery services as well as time slot deliveries (10am-2pm, 1-5pm, etc). And it can also greatly reduce the costs of same-day delivery – to below $5 (including GST).
“First of all, we don’t use a depot, warehouse or sorting centre system,” explains CEO Wang.
“Having such a system, in our view, unnecessarily slows down the delivery. Small retailers, in particular, don’t need to have their products go through a depot built for processing and sorting thousands of parcels a day.”
GoSHIFT’s Runners pick up goods from the retailer and immediately begin to deliver them to recipients’ doors, making use of mobile and digital technology.
“We have created a state-of-the-art algorithm that routes multiple jobs at one time. So, if you have jobs in all directions, our algorithm will sort out almost instantly the best route for those jobs, for delivery in three hours,” says Wang.
“On top of that, it will give a very accurate estimated working time (EWT). The EWT is composed of information such as past and present traffic conditions, toll roads, the weather, geographical factors, the density of the drop offs as well as the difficulty of the delivery.”
For example, delivering to a hospital has been found to be harder than delivering to a suburban home and information like this is factored in.
The Sender pays the Runner per hour, not per delivery. At the lowest rate of $28 (including GST) an hour, three hours of GoSHIFT deliveries will cost $84 (including GST). If, say, 20 orders are delivered in that period, the cost per delivery is $4.20 (including GST). If any orders are late, Go People will ensure that they are still delivered on the same day.
Wang says GoSHIFT can be an advantage to any type of retailer, but it’s a model best suited for medium- to large-sized B2B and B2C retailers in the five capital cities, who deal in consumer goods.
GoSHIFT is also commitment to transparency. Both the retailer and customer have access to a continually updated tracking map. Tracking updates are also offered via SMS and email. “No more will you receive glib statements about what happened to your order four hours ago,” says Wang.
Find out more via the GoShift website.
