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Growing to 1,000 customers in 3 months




Overview

You may have noticed an abundance of cannabis delivery companies in the past few months as legalization passed. If you haven't, take a moment to go to https://weedmaps.com and check out a few big cities near you.

A cannabis delivery company has a very simple concept, instead of using the https://ocs.ca website and waiting 3-5 days for a package, you can contact a delivery company instead. They charge a small premium for offering a same-day delivery service as opposed to waiting several days, however, some delivery companies are less expensive than the Ontario Cannabis Store, making it a valuable service to a large population.

Three months ago my friend contacts me asking for assistance in building his own delivery company, I gladly agreed to offer some insight and see what unique solutions we could find to differentiate ourselves.

Right off the bat, we decided upon taking a modern approach to business development as opposed to following the rest of the competition.

For context, roughly 90% of all delivery companies had an antique method of using their service:
"Send us a text at (123) 456 - 7890 with what you want to order"

Sounds more like your neighborhood drop out drug dealer than a business, right? We thought so too.

Our Idea

"Okay, so there is no way I'm having customers text my personal number to place an order, this will be chaos." (It is chaos, we tried it.)

"Who is currently in the delivery sector and leading the way? Why are they the most utilized?" Well, UberEats & SkipTheDishes comes to mind.

But why does UberEats dominate the food delivery business? What happened to calling your local Chinese food or pizza restaurant and asking for a delivery?

It's a pain. No one enjoys pain, no one wants to make a phone call these days. What happens after 45 minutes and you have no idea where your pizza is? You call the 

restaurant but they simply say "it's out for delivery." You tell your hungry family it's on the way and go back to waiting in the dark.


Solution

We need a pain free way of letting our customers view our products and place an order without having to make a phone call or send a text. No problem, an e-commerce website makes sense here.

The standard options were lackluster for our product offering, not many easy setup online stores had options to specify the weight for example, a key component in a cannabis store.

We decided to go with our own solution we developed in house. To make things simple for updating our website we decided to integrate with the ever-popular Weedmaps. (https://weedmaps.com)

This meant that we can have a single source of truth for our products, this allows us to simply update our Weedmaps menu and instantly have the same products represented on our eCommerce website.

Changing prices, pictures, adding, removing, specials and much more went from a tedious time-consuming task to a 3-second update on the Weedmaps platform menu editor.



Now that our customers can view all of our products we are ready to proceed to the next step, checkout.

This wasn't too complicated either, for a small improvement we wrote an API to accept orders and automatically send out an SMS to our customer and our dispatcher.

This instant SMS response to the customer helped boost our growth tremendously. As well as providing an easy method of passing orders to drivers by simply forwarding the text message with the order details to the driver nearby.

This method worked very well for us. We grew a customer base to 400 in only a month.

Word of mouth and some small advertising budgets allowed us to quickly dominate our local city and nearby towns.

Then it got hectic again.


The Next Problem


20-30 text messages with orders every single day, scrolling through to find certain customers, searching entire phone records to find a customer phone number, forgetting orders, etc, etc etc.

Our drivers were incredibly overloaded and so was our dispatcher.

Once again, technology will be used to help us out here. We constructed a database to hold order information and associate it with a customer. We developed a system of stages for every order to clarify and ensure nothing is left behind.
The drivers now run an application on their mobile phones which allows them to easily mark orders as completed, canceled, on the route, etc. It also provides a map with every order plotted, this allows for a quick overview of the current status of orders.

We expanded this application after receiving great feedback from our drivers on the ease of use.
Almost every single driver flat out refused to stop using the application after getting a taste. I recall a driver standing patiently as I pushed an updated build to his iPhone, he kept asking "it will still work right? I don't have to manually type the text messages? right? I can't go back to that workflow"

Here's an example workflow, before & after utilizing our new application:

Before
  1. The driver receives a text message with the order details.
  2. The driver finds the phone number, copies it down, opens SMS and types it in.
  3. The driver texts the order recipient stating that they are on the way now.
  4. The driver opens Google Maps, back to his text messages, finds the address, copies back to Google Maps to type it in.
  5. Driver checks for the estimated time till arrival, back to text messages, send a text letting the customer know the time estimate.
  6. Finally, the driver starts driving towards his destination until his other order messages him asking for an ETA in which he pulls over and repeats the whole process.
After
  1. The driver receives an order via push notification
  2. The driver taps it and then taps "Start Order"
  3. The application will calculate the distance, automatically send the text message with the estimated time of arrival and then even open Google Maps to the exact address with directions.
  4. When a customer texts asking for an ETA, he has a button to simply respond to the customer automatically.
Needless to say, it was a big hit and made the lives of everyone in the company a lot better.

Dispatch used to be a full-time job with incredibly high levels of stress, now, once in a while, you see a new order and simply tap which driver to assign it too. Easy.


Conclusion

Wrapping everything up, technology was the sole reason for our success as a delivery company. Our website assisted customers in every way through their ordering process and our backend order management application allowed us to streamline and operate at maximum effiency.

If you'd like to check out our current platform, visit us at https://deliverylabs.ai


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