Roadie, a crowdsourced delivery platform, said Wednesday it has launched a service enabling same-day local deliveries from retailers’ warehouses to residential destinations.
The service, called Roadie Direct, allows retailers to offer customers local home delivery of e-commerce orders from their existing warehouses while avoiding the costs of middle-mile transportation, shelving and re-picking required for same-day delivery from stores, the Atlanta-based company said.
The company launched the service earlier this year for select retailers. The full rollout comes ahead of the holiday peak shopping season, a challenging time for all retailers as they scale to meet a surge in consumer demand.
Roadie Direct will allow retailers to better leverage their existing warehouse footprints to provide fast deliveries without taking on additional infrastructure investments, the company said. The service bundles in-house sortation with the new Roadie SmartSort app and integration with Roadie’s crowdsourced delivery platform.
“Retailers already have a lot of the resources they need to sort, stage and deliver products in-house,” said Marc Gorlin, founder and CEO of Roadie. “They have a physical footprint that’s usually close to their customers, and they have dedicated teams staffing that footprint. Roadie Direct delivery from warehouses provides the final piece — the technology that can turn legacy warehouses into same-day logistics hubs.”
After sorting, the orders are sent to the Roadie platform, where its algorithm batches the orders. The batched orders are posted on the Roadie platform for pickup and delivery by a driver crowdsourced on the Roadie platform.
The Roadie nationwide network includes more than 200,000 independent drivers with a range of vehicle types to accommodate nearly any size SKU in a warehouse, the company said.
Roadie is owned by UPS Inc. (NYSE: UPS).
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