With Amazon Prime dominating the global shipping market, retailers are always looking for ways to ship their goods as quickly and efficiently as possible. Enter Roadie. Roadie is a service Modern Retail has been integrating with for years to bring same-day local delivery to your business. Like Uber or DoorDash, Roadie is a gig network, but instead of picking up people or food, drivers pick up your order from your retailer and deliver it to your door.

What is Roadie?

Acquired by UPS in 2021, Roadie crowdsources drivers to create a quickly functioning and eco-friendly supply chain for businesses of all scales. On a broader level, Roadie works by creating shipping assignments for their approved drivers, who follow their assigned route to deliver orders to your customers. It's an impressive model, one that utilizes drivers already on the road to create a reliable source of labor as well as meet the increasingly common expectation of same-day delivery.

Together, Modern Retail and Roadie have worked together to create the Roadie Integration, a solution for retailers who don’t have their own delivery service, but would like to offer it to their customers.

How Roadie Works

Roadie takes all the hard work out of delivering your customer's order in just a few simple steps:

1. It all starts with a customer placing an order on your company website.

2. The order then goes to Modern Retail’s Admin Panel, where you have time to review it and gather all the products together.

3. Once that’s done, you mark your order as “Ready for Pickup” in the Admin Panel once it’s all done.

4. All there’s left to do is wait for your Roadie delivery driver to come pick up your order(s) from the location, and wait for the notification that the order was delivered.

5. Once that goes through, the order will be updated in the Admin Panel to reflect that, and you’re done!

Gig Sizing and Pricing

The way Roadie determines pricing and payment for their delivery drivers is based on the “gig size” or the size of the order. For example, if one customer orders ten 40 lb. bag of dog food from your pet store, and another orders a couple of chew toys, the cost of delivery will differ between the two. In some cases, some Roadie delivery drivers are not eligible to pick up orders bigger than a certain size, as the orders wouldn’t be able to fit in their delivery vehicle. For more information, read our support article about Roadie Gig Sizing.

With Roadie, retailers can compete with quick-shipping behemoth Amazon– giving customers the option to get their orders delivered on the same day that they’re placed. If you’re thinking about utilizing Roadie for your business, talk to your project manager, or use the Admin Panel to submit a support request.