Bringg, a leading data-led delivery and fulfillment cloud platform provider released its 2022 Bringg Barometer: State of Retail Delivery & Fulfillment. The survey highlights new findings from a recent study of 500 enterprise retailers in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Italy. Insights uncovered include the current strengths and weaknesses of retailers’ last-mile delivery capacity, fulfillment costs, and the ability to meet their customers’ fulfillment needs with their recent delivery ecosystem.
COVID-19 forced businesses to adopt solutions that allowed them to meet customers’ evolving expectations rapidly. This report has found that throughout 2021, consumers continued to prioritize last-mile fulfillment speed and convenience, accelerating the need for retailers and e-commerce brands to find long-term solutions that enable them to deliver faster, more efficiently, and cost-effectively. To do so in 2022, retailers understand they need to prioritize a connected fulfillment network, automation capabilities, and hyperlocal delivery.
99% of respondents say they will be doing same-day delivery within the next three years, compared to 35% able to do so today. However, many of the current last-mile fulfillment models do not support same-day or on-demand delivery, with 36% saying they don’t have the technology, citing real-time order visibility as the main problem, and 24% calling out the sheer distance they need to travel from warehouse to fulfillment as a primary obstacle to delivering on time.
“The retail industry is reinventing itself and adjusting its fulfillment operations to the current market eruptions which are paving the way for cost-effective, fast fulfillment,” said Guy Bloch, CEO of Bringg. “From what we’ve seen in our latest barometer report, the retail industry is highly agile, with a third of retailers (33%) highly confident that they can pivot to respond to new, pandemic-driven customer behavior. With a need for more delivery capacity, greater tech innovation, and stronger partnerships with providers, now is the time for the 49% of ‘somewhat’ confident retailers to prove that they, too, can be agile enough to improve delivery speed and convenience. To get there, retailers will need to connect and automate their delivery network resources, processes and technologies, and adopt hyperlocal fulfillment as a goal for 2022”.
Survey findings include:
- Retailers have an urgent need for greater connectivity, but a lack of visibility and outdated technology is holding them back. 44% are managing multiple fulfillment channels with disparate technologies, and 61% cite problems with visibility into the last mile.
- The biggest pain points when it comes to scaling delivery is a lack of real-time visibility once the order is out for delivery according to 61% of respondents, 55% called out the inefficient manual nature of the way they currently plan and dispatch their orders and only 35% have fully automated last-mile delivery and fulfillment operations.
- When it comes to pain points associated with fast and on time delivery, a lack of data is a central concern for retailers due to real time order visibility (in this case, 51%) and travel time (49%). This problem is exacerbated by multiple delivery partners, as 26% of retailers say they are struggling with visibility when working with third parties.
- Retailers are moving away from a reliance on a single traditional carrier and are pivoting to a mix of providers to connect with their customers faster, with 55% using multiple fleets for last mile delivery.
- Sustainability and carbon emissions are an important consideration, with 56% of retailers using fleets with EV vehicles, and 1 in 3 using bike fleets.
In 2021 Bringg saw the results of Covid on the increase in eCommerce across all retail verticals, and this year it has become clear that the consumer behaviors adopted then are here to stay. This report indicates that retailers respond and understand the need to scale out services for the long term while maintaining speed, brand identity, and cost-efficiency.
With Bringg’s release of the new Delivery Hub, retailers can swiftly increase delivery capacity, gain more visibility into third-party delivery operations, and maintain complete control of the end consumer’s delivery experience. By building and managing personalized delivery provider networks, retailers retain full ownership of the data, relationships, and branded delivery experiences for sustainable last-mile growth.
Click here to access the 2022 Bringg Barometer: State of Retail Delivery and Fulfillment.