Today, home delivery and sustainability are coming together in consumers’ minds. Descartes recently conducted a comprehensive study to help retailers understand not only how this convergence is changing consumer home delivery preferences; but also how retailers can take advantage of these evolving preferences to help themselves and the environment.
The good news is that consumers are becoming more flexible about their delivery choices. They want retailers to provide sustainable delivery options; and favour retailers that are focused on sustainability.
The even better news is that most of the sustainable delivery options come at a lower cost for retailers to operationalise, compared with traditional deliveries. This presents a strong opportunity for retailers to create more customer loyalty and to reduce delivery costs, while helping the environment. Chris Jones, EVP, Descartes explains and reveals key findings from Descartes’ recent research.
The demand for “eco-friendly” home delivery is strong
The study pointed to a number of findings that indicate that many consumers care about the environment and what retailers do about it does impact their buying decisions. The last finding in the list below is a significant one for retailers because it helps to drive the first three metrics:
•45% said that helping the environment is quite/very important in their daily lives
•39% said that they always/regularly make purchasing decisions based upon the environmental impact of a company or a product
•40% would buy more from grocers who demonstrated that their supply chains were more sustainable than the competition
•50% were quite/very interested in environmentally friendly home delivery options.
Three sustainable delivery options were highly appealing to consumers
Respondents were asked what sustainable delivery options were most important to them. The following findings point to the three most appealing sustainable delivery options for consumers—all of which can reduce costs for retailers:
•50% thought the ability to combine orders to have them arrive all at once was quite/very important
•48% said that they were quite/very interested in having retailers recommend the most environmentally friendly delivery option
•38% were quite/very were willing to wait longer for deliveries to make them more environmentally friendly.
Making sustainable delivery happen
Achieving these three sustainable delivery options allows retailers to better consolidate deliveries and increase delivery density. The key to leveraging eco-friendly delivery options, though, is to understand which are more sustainable and present them to customers before they make a delivery decision.
Specialised delivery appointment scheduling tools, such as those Descartes offers, provide retailers with the capabilities they need to highlight the most environmentally friendly delivery options to their shoppers; to dynamically offer services that combine deliveries; and to present options that extend the delivery time (e.g. slow down the delivery) to create more environmentally friendly plans. These options all combine to help create more efficient and profitable delivery operations for retailers, and they reduce their carbon footprint.
At Descartes, we’re focused on helping customers improve their performance while contributing to greener, more sustainable and productive logistics. To learn more about Descartes’ home delivery solution go here: routinguk.descartes.com/resources/sustainability-research.
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