2023-12-28 06:25:00
CDo you know the “pedestrian drive”? The principle is very simple. You turn on your computer, connect to the website of your favorite brand, do your shopping and your order is delivered within hours to a small store close to your home that you can, as the name suggests, reach you on… foot, whenever you want.
Intended for customers living in the heart of cities, it must be distinguished on the one hand from the classic “drive”, which requires the use of a car and on the other hand, from home delivery.
Food e-commerce has long been the last bastion that resisted digital, but consumers, after the successive confinements due to Covid-19, are increasingly tending to use the Web to buy food. This is how almost all major retail brands have embarked on the adventure of pedestrian drive, the fatal weapon in the “battle of the last mile” and the conquest of the urban customer: Cora, E.Leclerc, Carrefour, Auchan…
READ ALSO Attacks in the Red Sea: Ikea facing delivery problemsBut if the principle of the pedestrian drive is very simple, its implementation is not… The business model of these pedestrian collection points is not obvious and only offers uncertain profitability for the brands that propose it. The costs are numerous: renting premises in the city center, hiring staff to deliver orders, the fleet of trucks to set up, etc. This is why certain players quickly lowered their ambitions in this area by putting the brakes on the development of pedestrian drive openings. “In food e-commerce, which has exploded in particular since the Covid-19 crisis, the problem to be solved remains that of the last mile,” summarizes Stéphane Legatelois, 54, a logistics professional who previously worked at Rakuten and at Carrefour. But the entrepreneur claims to have found the solution to save the pedestrian drive, which he considers to be “the ideal instrument for virtuous and sustainable logistics, making it possible to shape the city of the future”.
Bring together all distributor orders in a single pedestrian drive
His idea: if pedestrian drives dedicated to a brand are not profitable, then they must be shared! This is the only way to optimize delivery flows in urban areas. And this is beneficial for the environment, because it drastically limits the number of trucks, and therefore the level of pollution in the city. His company Delipop, founded in June 2021 with two partners who are experts in logistics and e-commerce, offers the first network of universal, multi-merchant collection points, dedicated to food e-commerce. These pedestrian drives, delivered by 12 to 19 ton trucks twice a day, at fixed times, early in the morning and in the middle of the afternoon before peaks in road traffic, therefore bring together orders placed under the same roof. from various distributors on the Internet or from local stores. Another major innovation, these order collection centers which can accommodate dry, fresh or frozen products are fully automated. “Our completely autonomous solution, without on-site personnel, allows us to offer very competitive costs in line with economic models. We are able to deliver 2 to 3 orders simultaneously to avoid waiting times during peak activity times. Customers, whose average order amount is around 60 euros, enter the fully secure and robotic collection point with a QR code. A few minutes later, they leave with their order under their arm. »
For brands, this pooling obviously allows sharing of delivery costs. For the city, it means fewer trucks and pollution. For the customer, it is the possibility of having access, right at their doorstep, to offers and prices that are usually found in hypermarkets in peripheral areas. For Delipop, it remains to convince major distributors to join the adventure. Delipop has already reached an agreement with Carrefour and is in negotiations to sign with other players such as Intermarché, Cora or Monoprix. Finally, it goes without saying that this model only works if there are enough pedestrian drives so that city dwellers do not have to walk miles to collect their orders. This is why Delipop is moving forward at a forced pace. Its ambition in Paris is to ultimately reach 200 collection points. The company has only opened around ten in Paris, but aims to deploy around a hundred new collection points in the next two years.
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