Roadie

With customer demands for rapid delivery growing every day, isn’t it time more small to medium-sized retailers looked into offering same-day delivery? Today, retailers are competing with the likes of Amazon– a giant in the industry that has made its name in part due to its wildly fast shipping. Retailers may want to offer faster shipping, but don’t have all the resources for it. Enter Roadie. Roadie is a crowdsourced delivery service that allows retailers of all sizes to ship orders quickly, efficiently, and sustainably.

Acquired by UPS in 2021, Roadie uses crowdsourcing to find drivers to create a functional and eco-friendly supply chain for businesses of all sizes. Essentially, Roadie is like Uber for your business. Roadie works by creating shipping assignments for their approved drivers, who then follow their assigned route to deliver orders to your customers. This allows retailers who don’t have the resources of a big corporation to offer same-day shipping, letting them compete with large-scale retailers like Amazon or Walmart.

Modern Retail and Roadie

Modern Retail and Roadie have teamed up to create an integration that serves everyone, with a focus on small businesses who want to offer local delivery, but might not have their own delivery workforce. Roadie works with Modern Retail’s existing local delivery feature, allowing for a simple solution for you and for your clients. Here’s how it works:

1. A customer places a local delivery order on your site. You can use Modern Retail's Rules feature to control which locations & products support Local Delivery orders.

2. The order goes to the Modern Retail Admin Panel, where you can review it & get the required products together.

3. You or your staff mark the order as “Ready for Pickup” in the Admin Panel once it's ready for pickup.

4. A Roadie driver will go to the relevant location to pick the order up.

5. The driver delivers the order(s) to your customers. They'll mark the delivery as complete when they're done, and the order will be updated in the Admin Panel to reflect that.

In the span of a few hours, a customer can place and receive their order without ever having to leave their house. The best part? With the Modern Retail and Roadie integration, this whole process is automated. All retailers have to do is get the order ready for pickup, and Roadie, Modern Retail, and your delivery driver take care of the rest. Not only is Roadie super convenient, it’s also reasonably priced, and easy to use.

Order Management and Pricing

To calculate their prices, Roadie uses gig sizing. Since Roadie crowdsources its drivers, there’s no standard delivery truck size, so orders are priced based on what size vehicle it can be shipped in. For example, if one customer orders ten 40 lb bags of dog food from your pet store, and another orders a couple of chew toys, the delivery cost will differ between the two depending on driver availability and vehicle size. Here are our sizing guidelines:

With the Modern Retail/Roadie integration, you can also set rules for local delivery, so that you only deliver to customers in your area. Clients can establish a range of zip codes they can deliver to, that range is configured in the Admin Panel under Local Deliveries. On your website, the integration checks that list to confirm if a shopper's zip code is eligible for delivery. Customers can also set a store for a delivery driver to pick up the order from, so you can be sure that the item will be in stock when your delivery driver comes to pick it up.

Roadie in Action

With Roadie, offering local delivery options has never been easier. To compete in the ever-changing world of ecommerce, retailers need solutions that they can trust. Modern Retail clients have been using Roadie for years to offer quick and easy local delivery for clients.

Offering delivery to your customers is a challenge– hiring quality drivers, acquiring a fleet, compiling customer information, and offering same-day local delivery can present even more steps to work through. This can be daunting for retailers, and many may shy away. With Modern Retail and Roadie, retailers can be confident in the fact that their delivery needs are completely taken care of, allowing them to do what they do best; take care of customer needs.

Is Roadie right for your business? Contact us and to see how Modern Retail and Roadie can get you on the road to faster, easier delivery.