How AI and Blockchain will be changing the way we receive our goods.
In the last few weeks, America’s largest company, Walmart, announced that it is planning to expand it’s same day delivery service to over 100 different cities across the US. Only currently available in 6 markets, they aim to have their service available to more than 40% of U.S. households by the end of the year.
They are trying to compete with Amazon, a same-day delivery giant, but they are not alone as more and more companies are starting to offer this once premium service on a wide range of products and goods.
Which makes sense.
There is a growing demand for this kind of service. U.S. online grocery sales totalled around $14.2 billion in 2017 and by 2021 they are expected to rise to nearly $30 billion.
But it is not just grocery shopping driving the same-day delivery market. A poll of 995 people carried out in February of this year by Dropoff, a national courier service in America, found 47% of people had paid extra for a faster delivery time for any goods in the previous 12 months. 50% said they would be more inclined to shop for goods online if same-day delivery was the norm and 74% said they would be more likely to revisit an online store that provided a same-day service.
So with the demand clearly being there, how is the market place going to adjust to meet it?
A classic ‘Hub & Spoke’ model has its benefits in distributing worldwide or over huge distances but it is not designed to manage a same-day delivery service. The best it can typically do is ‘next -day’ and for same city deliveries, often packages will take inefficient routes to their destinations via the ‘Hub’.
Some companies have seen a gap in the market though and have setup to act as a middleman, taking commission for facilitating the deliveries. But this system has its flaws too, as Phillip Lee, CEO of VOLT, a Point to Point delivery platform told IrishTechNews earlier this year. “Messengers and customers were not always matched [correctly], so Volt’s employees had to manage orders [themselves].”
So to solve this problem, VOLT have come up with another way.
They have developed a Point-to-Point (P2P) decentralised platform, based on Blockchain, that will cut out the middleman and their commission fee’s by connecting messengers directly with senders. The efficiency of the deliveries will be increased using AI to streamline the process, matching senders to the right messengers. Do to the decentralized nature of the platform, the service will be completely transparent, giving all parties a way of tracking fees and expenses securely.
This method will lower fees for the customer, provide the messengers with more profit and will also decrease emissions due to a more efficient delivery system.
As the same-day delivery market continues to grow, more and more companies and indivudals will be looking to utilise a service like VOLT. Small businesses especially will be looking for a way to compete with the big boys and as technology continues to look towards an ever increasingly decentralised future, more companies like VOLT will come into the fold offering a smarter, cheaper more efficent alternative to the current way of doing things.
sources:
https://www.twice.com/retailing/ship-it-fast-and-they-will-spend