Inspiration

All the people on our team live in small towns in Italy. We really love our small cities, but one of the worst aspects of this pandemic emergency is the impossibility of our communities of getting smart home-deliveries for needed things. All famous home-delivery networks are not available in our small towns, and local shops, stores, and drugstores often don't offer the possibility of home-delivery. The reason is that in small-towns, the cost-benefit profitability is far from being attractive. This leaves locals to long queuing times in front of shops, thus simultaneously exposing them to increased contagion risk.

A local viewpoint for a possible solution........

We want to build a sustainable delivery network for smaller cities, reaching out to local shops, stores, and markets that could increase local commerce volumes and help shops now under considerable strain due to the pandemic crisis. We want to build a possible permanent network for the future, a system that could entail a sustainable delivery solution granting to "local" marketplaces a performing and cost-profitable home-delivery service platform. We want to create a reliable network through fair cost-benefit profitability and a business model that can be exported in many different cities across Europe.

How we build it

We aim to develop a delivery network for small and medium cities that can provide local shops, stores, and markets with an easy and convenient way to deliver their goods to their local customers. We tried to model everything as a sustainable business that could help to recover work volumes and productivity during the pandemic crisis and still be of use after the emergency is over. We have focused our planning on: Creating new jobs Helping local shops and markets with home deliveries Develop an affordable cost-benefit option for shop owners

Challenges we ran into

Workforce

What kind of staff can we target to represent a viable solution? We are targeting small and medium cities (about 15k and 30k people), thus allowing us to leverage potential figures reasonably more realistic than for bigger cities.

The Staff directly manage deliveries and vice-versa

If we can arrange a service carried out by self-employed staff, we can reasonably reduce costs. Still, we can't actually optimize the routes chosen to get a consistently-high number of deliveries per day, within specific geographical limits where it's no longer convenient for the self-employed courier to work with us. On the other hand, in the case of hired staff tend overall costs tend to increase, but this allows us to directly optimize the delivery routes. It was a really challenging cost-effective issue to work on, but we have tried to work it out it by developing two distinct business plans. The first one has been designed considering "self-employed couriers "while the other one takes into account "hired staff".

What kind of delivery does the customer wants?

We guessed what sort of delivery features we wanted, and made an online poll that helped us figure out people's preferences. We discovered that most of the shop customers would have paid up to 3 euros for delivery, and that speed was not a crucial issue. The customer would also be willing to wait, on average, half a day for the delivery, and that could enable us to optimize the logistics at best.

Payment

We also need to consider the payment issue. In smaller cities, seniors are often not comfortable with electronic payments; for this reason, we need to take into account both electronic and cash payments, and we found ways to deal with them both. In case of cash payment, we can deduct the bill from the employee's salary while he keeps the money he gets from the customer. Electronic payments are easier to handle as the staff has a POS for safe customer payments.

Placing an order

Another interesting aspect of the planning refers to the type of communication between the shop owner and its customers when placing an order. Our poll shows that most people are very comfortable placing an order using WhatsApp, SMS, or phone. This is even accountable for seniors, most of which are unable to use smartphones or web interfaces to place an order. That's why we took into account phone calls, SMS, and other traditional ways of placing orders for shop owners.

So... it's placing a delivery

Right now, we don't want to consider orders coming directly from the shop customers. Instead, we want the shop owners to have a natural means to contact us, notifying that delivery has to be made. In the end, our final product consists of developing a web application where shop owners can issue a deliver, complemented with a back-end system that can schedule the orders in an optimized way, given the courier fleet.

Contracts and groups

A critical aspect is to get the right amount of couriers for the delivery volume in each city. So we thought that we can propose to shop owners to sign contracts, guaranteeing a maximum number of deliveries in a month and also considering the possibility of grouping more shop owners to reach the minimum quota for starting the service in a city.

MVP

Since we can't really develop a route-optimization system in such a short time, and we really want to make a difference helping for the crisis, we decided to adopt a more community-driven MVP. During the emergency, most people are confined at home, doing nothing, and getting bored. We want to provide them a way to help people in need. Our MVP is a web application where someone can place a delivery order, and whoever signs up as a rider can bring the package to the destination for free or a small fee. It's just up to people ..... often generous and big-hearted. After the crisis, we could rethink this last issue to create a durable business and more profitability for the courier.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We really made a rush to tackle this problem, and we hope we can contribute to finding "local" successful issues to help with actions that can relieve the economic crisis of "local" commercial subjects. Still, we have great expectations about this project also after the pandemic, from a fair, sustainable, and profitable point of view. And last but not least .... we are proud to offer our support to help people in need ..... for free.

What we learned

We learned a lot of exciting things related to this kind of business. First of all, it's crucial to focus if, for this kind of job, the best option is self-employed or hired staff.

What's next for LastMile

What we want to achieve is to start experimenting in some cities and then expand our solution to more cities all around Europe. We are striving to get in touch with city shop owners, legal advisors, and investors to kick off the solution.

Local markets

The next major step is to expand our market to reach local outdoor-markets, helping them too with local deliveries. There are a lot more issues in this scenario needing to be addressed, and there are plenty of market options we can develop to make a difference.

Deal with digitalization

After we establish the network, we can help our customers to reach their customers more quickly by giving them a platform where people can directly order what they need. We can even partner with solutions that already tried to solve this problem.

Bigger cities

Another attractive development option could look at deliveries in bigger cities. At first, we would really want to focus on a reliable network model that can be expanded in different cities across Europe. After this stage, we would tackle the market in bigger cities, trying to develop new business models for the challenge to come.

Export our model

The most exciting thing is the chance to export our business in all of Europe. We worked hard to make it easily adaptable to any country, not only Italy!

Built With

We are cloud-native developers, so we imagine scalable and cost-effective solutions for living. We built this with AWS and a serverless approach to keep the rock-bottom costs and provide the most resiliency to the users. We used python and pure javascript and HTML for prototyping things better and a CDN to speed things up.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• python
• serverless