3 Biggest Challenges in Last Mile Delivery and How To Overcome Them

Last mile delivery can be a headache for your supply chain, and it’s never easy to solve the problems that it can cause. With online shoppers’ expectations for fast and reliable delivery growing, finding solutions to meet the consumer’s demands in 2020 requires innovative thinking beyond the status quo. These are some continuing issues that we’ve been hearing about throughout the year in the last mile logistics space.

Cost

The last mile process amounts to about 28% of the delivery cost for e-Commerce. There's no good way around this cost, because the last mile is the necessary piece to customer satisfaction. Companies need to have the fastest and most reliable last mile delivery partner to perform their deliveries in order to keep up with the competition.

Not only is speed critical against other beasts in the retail and e-Commerce world, but customer care is also important. In many cases, the customer is willing to pay extra to have their items safely delivered by a company that cares about them. As a retailer, you should be willing to find a partner with high satisfaction rates and quality service as well. However, those quality last mile couriers often come at the higher cost.

Retailers and e-Commerce sellers have to find a balance of cost efficiency, customer satisfaction, and reliability in order to keep up with the competition in the space. Businesses with brick-and-mortar stores are finding that a ship-from-store model is helping them win the race for fast and efficient delivery. OneVim is the perfect partner to solve this problem, saving you money and satisfying the customer's needs and expectations.

Customer Satisfaction

From delivery tracking communication to the driver's attitude when they knock on the door, getting your products to the customer isn't just the only key to their satisfaction. The consumer's expectation is evolving into a balance of fast and reliable. They want to be able to trust the carrier to get it to them on time, with tracking and communication, handled with care, and with a smile on their face.

When your delivery partner fails to perform these expectations, the blame falls on you as the one offering your items to the consumer. You should be doing constant analysis in your customer service department to ensure that your customers are happy with the fulfillment of their orders. If there's ever an issue with customer care, it's often on the last mile delivery end. When packages are hurdle through checkpoints and there are issues, it makes it harder for the last mile delivery partner to perform their part of the process with the best customer care possible.

If you're a retailer with a brick-and-mortar store, you can eliminate these distribution errors by offering your online products from the customer's local store. With OneVim, it's as simple as handing off the item to the driver from the shelf, and it will arrive to the customer within the same-hour. In fact, we already have an app developed that can take care of this on the customer's side. They can order an item from your store for pickup, but send a OneVim driver to pick it up and drop it off for them.

Efficiency

There are many issues that arise in the last mile that minimize efficiency and productivity, resulting in profit losses and higher costs. One trend we've seen in this space for a lot of companies is the fleet ownership model that Amazon developed in the past couple of years. By the end of 2019, their fleet reached up to 30,000 vehicles, and it's only grown since then. Other companies have adopted this model, building their own fleets in select local areas to perform last mile deliveries.

This system may be efficient for an e-Commerce giant like Amazon, but it proves to be counterproductive and costly for other companies. We've seen this same push to owning and managing company fleets in the food industry, as well, with the rise of online delivery platforms. Many restaurants realized their potential for delivery service, but wanted off of platforms like Postmates and UberEats because of their effect on the bottom-line. But even here, the cost of owning and managing internal drivers and vehicles adds up for smaller businesses, driving a deeper pain in the last mile problem.

Companies like OneVim allow you to maximize efficiency by offering the products from your shelves to be delivered to the local customer. Our delivery drivers are available when you need them, and you only pay for the performance of each delivery, rather than the hourly costs associated with owning your own fleet. Our drivers stay productive and will treat your business as if they're part of the team.