Comment by elemeno | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elemeno | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The website is nice, but I'm not sure that the business model is sound.

This is for two different reasons -

1) If there was a solid business case for making deliveries between 6pm and 10pm (reasonable after-work hours), why aren't delivery companies already doing so? If there was a case for it, I'm sure they'd happily do it and charge extra for it - just like many of them charge extra to guarantee delivery before a certain time in the morning.

1.1) Is missed deliveries really that big of a problem? Anecdotally, I order a lot of things online for delivery - to the extent that I managed to make over 190 orders on Amazon alone in one year. In the past two years or so, I've had less than a dozen parcels that couldn't be delivered on the first or second try. I live in a building with six other apartments - it's rare that someone isn't around to sign for a package.

2) There's an increasing number of shops that offer a locker service like Amazon Locker Service. Since this doesn't cost me anything extra, other than the time taken to pick up the parcel, what's the incentive to use a service like yours?

Thanks for your comment!

1. I would actually completely agree with you that evening deliveries is not enough to sustain a business. Our roadmap consists of many other delivery/shipping services that will be rolled out. We just thought the concept of night deliveries was a good way to introduce the consumer side of our company, building off from there. Especially as it helps polish our internal system methods before we offer 24/7 delivery.

2. Indeed, London also has other services like Collect+ where you can get your item at your local corner shop. We do plan on introducing our own locker system now in the spring, so we are on board and in support of the locker system as existing in harmony with a dedicated delivery system too.

1.1) Not everyone lives in a building with six other apartments. Don't underestimate a) the number of people who might not have neighbours available to sign b) how much some of us don't particularly want to keep bothering our neighbours in the evening, collecting packages from them. Almost everything that can happen to a package when I'm not available to sign for it is problematic: I recently had a Mac Mini delivered, which I wasn't present for. It had been left in a 'safe place', of course: our recycling bin...

1) I guess we shouldn't try to implement anything, because if it was a viable business model, someone would have already done it, right? You can used this argument against anything.

This is the perfect time for people who actually work, so most people with a disposable income.

Not at all.

However if you're going to enter a market that already has multiple players and can be assumed to be competitive then surely it's important to understand why your competitors aren't doing whatever your idea is as it's likely to suggest if your idea might not be feasible, or profitable, or if there's another issue that might get in the way that you don't know about yet. Of course on the other hand it might tell you why it's not a good idea for them, but is a good idea for you - they might be burdened with legacy systems that would need to be rewritten to deal with deliveries after 5pm. They might have employee contracts which are hard to renegotiate. They might have hubs that are too far away from their delivery sites to make a shorter delivery run profitable after employee time and fuel costs are taken into account. But unless you're willing to ask the question, you're not going to know are you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com