The snaking route to Delhivery's D2C destination! How often have you not made a purchase because delivery would take a long time? We have the deep-pocketed e-commerce firms to thank for diminishing our patience with product delivery times. With same-day delivery being the standard, users of large e-commerce platforms now only expect quick deliveries. Even direct-to-customer (D2C) brands are feeling the need to compete on delivery times.
This is primarily because D2C brands have risen in prominence. In 2018, D2C brands were just 5% of the overall e-commerce volumes, with horizontal platforms like Amazon and Flipkart making up the rest. This number has reached 20% now and is likely to be 43% by 2026.
For D2C brands, same-day delivery is not just about customer satisfaction—it also helps deliver (heh) on other fronts like customer retention.
All of this makes for a pretty opportunity for Delhivery, a logistics giant that went public recently. Delivering 1.4 billion express deliveries gives it the nuanced understanding it needs to do this business—of intra- and inter-city routes, including bottlenecks like traffic hotspots or tolls and how to factor them. So much so, that the company wants to make same-day deliveries for D2C packages ordered up till 3 pm.
This is not the first time Delhivery has tried this. Costs came in the way of its previous attempts. This time, it's the competition. Every-one from Amazon to aggregator Shiprocket wants to service this burgeoning segment. Today newsletter has a deeply-reported story on what it will take for Delhivery to figure out the best route to destination D2C.
