Minus Moonshine + Getcho: Same-Day Delivery to Manhattan From Both Brooklyn Stores

Minus Moonshine is a two-door retailer that sells non-alcoholic beverages.

It has a notably inviting atmosphere; I walked by their Greenpoint store years ago and was drawn in by the branding. Their mocktails and potions are excellent gifts, especially for dry friends and family.

Minus Moonshine uses Shopify for eCommerce orders. Store staff has Shopify Point of Sale to fulfill orders from the web. We pitched one of the cofounders, Juan, on using Getcho’s top-rated ship-from-store Shopify app to offer same-day delivery. Juan actually already offered local delivery, sending orders to gig drivers, but wanted to crack into the Manhattan market (most gig drivers don’t go that far), and had a few issues with products not being delivered.

Going farther; expanding Minus Moonshine’s delivery radius

Local delivery is interesting. It’s similar to buy-online-pickup-in-store (“BOPIS”): local customers receive orders directly from retail locations.

Yet it’s so different:

• BOPIS customers live, on average, 3.8 miles away from the pickup location. Local delivery customers live, on average, 7.2 miles away from the store. In terms of square miles, that’s 4x bigger (162 vs 45); in a city like Chicago, LA or New York that could be the difference of a million people!
• BOPIS customers sometimes make store purchases upon pickup; same-day delivery customers reorder more frequently.
• Customers specifically pick the store for a BOPIS order. That means they might have to click around to see who has their whole cart in stock. Local delivery - at least with Getcho - gives the retailer more latitude to send from various locations.

Therefore, expanding radius is the name of the game for local delivery.

It opens the door to a new set of customers who otherwise wouldn’t shop in-store.

Stores don’t go on expanding their radius indefinitely because longer deliveries cost more (there’s a point where they’re prohibitively expensive), and it’s harder to find drivers. That makes the logistics of closing time more complicated - what if you’ve promised a customer 40 miles away same-day delivery but can’t find a driver?

Getcho has gamed this out. We help retailers price their shipping, pick their range based on driver guarantees, and get great rates by leveraging local carriers alongside the national courier companies.

Within a few days of talking to Juan, Manhattan customers were placing delivery orders from Minus Moonshine for the first time.

Fulfillment locations

Omnichannel companies with retail locations and an eCommerce presence can take different tacts:

• Stores are for shopping and warehouses are for shipping OR
• Some stores are for shopping AND shipping

There’s no right answer. Warehouses and 3pls are more efficient at shipping - they tend to get good shipping rates with USPS, UPS and FedEx since they send in bulk, they have economies of scale on pulling and packing, and they can house limitless SKUs.

The ship-from-store strategy has its advantages:

• Retail locations are near large populations so they can deliver more quickly (and often more cheaply).
• For heavy and fragile orders this is huge.
• BOPIS is table stakes for some businesses, so the pull/pack machinery already exists
• Potentially leaner inventory model

Prior to working with Getcho, Minus Moonshine shipped from only one location, in Prospect Heights. The other storefront, in Greenpoint, lacks the space and supplies to ship so it only handled in-person shopping.

But that meant customers couldn’t place certain orders online: they couldn’t order products that were only stocked at the Greenpoint location. That meant fewer sales and a smaller online inventory.

Getcho helped Minus Moonshine take Greenpoint online. Orders are still preferentially routed to Prospect Heights using Getcho’s Shopify Order Routing plugin. But when that’s not possible, Getcho sets up automatic inventory transfers between the two stores - these transfers are priced into the shipping cost and end up being very efficient. Batched runs mean that one driver can take several orders at once, slashing the incremental unit logistics and helping Minus Moonshine win more online sales.

Getcho has helped many retailers, like The Closeout Connection, City Man USA, PR Run & Walk, and Funny Face Bakery ship from more locations.