Local delivery for business

Getcho is a local delivery platform. We help local businesses fulfill to customers in the same city within two hours. Our partners have seen their businesses expand as they compete on search terms like “same day shopping”, “last minute gifts” and “hotel delivery”. They deliver faster than Amazon now.

In early 2021, Eater wrote about Getcho as a means to supporting local restaurants. Three years later, Getcho fights the same battle in retail: bringing local delivery to local businesses. Across categories like apparel, home goods and wine, customers are universally wowed by a great delivery experience.

Do customers want local delivery?

Isn’t the fastest way to buy something simply to drive over to the store?

In-store shoppers will likely continue to shop in-store. Same-day delivery attracts an entirely different set of customers who tend to be seen less. Here are the profiles we deliver to every day:

1. The out-of-towner who wants to send a gift to their local family member. These folks tend to be price insensitive - they just want something meaningful and fast. And local is always meaningful!

2. The businesswoman sitting on the tarmac and remembering she didn’t pack a pair of work shoes. We do a lot of deliveries to hotels while a customer is in the air.

3. The shopper who orders ten items from six different stores. Sometimes we’ll drop off purchases from different stores to the same address.

4. For bookstores: the reader who just finished a book and needs the sequel now (this happens a lot with Sarah J. Mass books incidentally).

5. The office that orders corporate gifts and supplies right to work

It didn’t occur to us that people wanted local delivery so badly until we released a delivery app and saw people bend over backwards to send a courier to stores that didn’t even have a website. For many people, a purchase is contingent on a quick local delivery. If you can offload your local delivery to Getcho, it’s really a no-brainer.

Does local delivery increase reach?

For some data, look at a non-local business like Sephora. They get around 1.4 million clicks from Google searches per month. And tens of thousands of these searches land on their same-day delivery FAQ page. We’re talking a serious percentage of their inbound traffic to an FAQ page where they explain that they offer same-day delivery.

That trend is even stronger for smaller stores. Local delivery was such a requested feature for small business that Shopify started supporting it for stores with fewer than 20 locations. It seems that the only thing stopping some customers from buying local is the convenience of couch-shopping.

We partner with a wine store that’s been in business for three generations. The owner said something that might resonate: when Amazon became ubiquitous, customers started expecting things right now. It’s finally now possible to level the playing field.

Improving customer experience with local delivery

Parcels and shipping don’t reflect a store’s personality. Fortunately, this is one of the ways that the local delivery experience can be so much better than UPS ground.

When Getcho does same-day delivery, we make it an extension of the in-store experience. Is this a gift for someone? We let the gifter know it was delivered with a photo. Does the store have a beautiful paper shopping bag? The USPS may not want to handle that, but we certainly will. And crucially, our system lets customers schedule deliveries for when they’ll be home to receive them. It’s a lot better than hoping a brown box is out on the porch somewhere.