Faster than Amazon......??

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Amazon was and still is the benchmark for many fulfilment companies. Not so long ago a UK TV shopping company set themselves a target of delivery to each customer by the 5th working day. Today most companies would frown on that as archaic, but at the time it was a great improvement on their normal 10 day average.

So, what has changed? Well, to start with, most businesses have started to get to grips with the "I want it now" culture and put better internal systems in place to relieve bottlenecks. Warehousing and distribution have  become more focussed on order turnaround to meet the ever increasing customer demands. More customer choices mean that if you don't keep up with what the customer wants, you will go the way of the dinosaur.

Web sites and payment options have also improved in leaps and bounds, helping to drive the "on-demand" culture. Digital content, such as films and games probably now do not need to be on physical disks, as the emphasis today is to get your goods the minute you pay for them. Game stores will need to up their ante too to meet this.

And so back to the market leader, Amazon. Can anyone beat them? We believe so. Small companies are more agile than larger ones and can use this agility to their advantage.

For example, we cut off orders at 2pm most days. If the order is able to be despatched by 2pm, it will be sent that same day. Our FREE default delivery is Royal Mail 2nd class, with customer options to go 1st class for a faster service and a small fee.

So, receiving an order by 2pm Monday, normally it will be with the customer on Wednesday, time depending on the local post delivery rounds. If the customer opted for a premium service, they would receive their order the next day.

Very simply we can provide a next day service, just like Amazon and our standard service is not too shabby either at 48 hours. Yes, there is a cost for next day delivery, but there is also a cost for it on Amazon - an Amazon Prime subscription costing £79 per year. Without the Prime subscription, Amazon delivery charges for next day are around £3.50.

Where we excel is in the picking and packing. We do it straight away. Amazon holds all orders for about 30 minutes to check that funds are cleared and then releases the order for fulfilment. This is the same time we see the orders too, but as soon as they appear, they can be and are picked and packed for shipping. Amazon has a huge system to cater for this and it's very clever, but it does take time to decide which warehouse will do the order and we have had a fair number of orders delayed for picking by more than a day. So now to avoid that , we do all our own fulfilment and we believe we are faster than Amazon.

Big does not mean fast. At the sharp end of an order, where the customer is, we know that time is of the essence and we demonstrate that every day. We now have more comments on the speed of delivery of our orders than we used to have when Amazon did the fulfilment, so we think we must be doing something right.....

Genuine customer feedback on Amazon : (early Dec 2016)

Arrived much earlier than expected, i a(m) rather pleased with my service

Fantastic service , speedy delivery, great piece . Exactly as I expected ! 5 stars - would order again !

Prompt service & delivery