It’s no secret now that same-day delivery is the future of online retail. But could it be the future of offline retail as well?

One company that thinks so is Deliv, a same-day retailer delivery service with a pretty different premise: Rather than employ an army of third-party couriers to do deliveries, Deliv wants to hire, well, you.

At the core of Deliv’s service is its heavily vetted crowdsourced driver workforce, which isn’t made up of pros but rather everyday folks. “These are not professional drivers. Most of them are college-educated with sales customer-service experience,” Deliv CEO Daphne Carmeli told me.

To anyone who has had a pizza delivery botched by a local punk, the prospect might be a bit worrying. Will anyone really want to trust their expensive purchases with some local nobody?

Deliv’s software automatically awards deliveries to the workers with the best ratings.

The concern is a valid one, but it seems to be addressed from all sides by Deliv’s extensive filtering process. Between background checks, a tough certification process, audits, and a ratings system, Deliv is doing a lot to ensure that its drivers are professional ones. “It’s a very white glove experience,” Carmeli said.

That experience seems to be an attractive one for investors, who gave Deliv $1 million last month.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Does anyone actually want same-day delivery in the first place? Turns out the answer is yes — but with some caveats. According to Carmeli, while speed is cool, early Deliv users seem to be much more fond of something else: convenience.

“Giving customers the capability to specify when and where they want something is way more valuable than speed. Home or office — people can make that change very quickly,”  Carmeli said.

While the needs of consumers are obviously important, Deliv’s larger challenge now is convincing large retailers that its take on same-day delivery makes sense for them.

And from a business sense, it does: For companies like Wal-Mart (which is also playing around with its own crowdsourced delivery idea), the promise of same-day delivery means having another valuable weapon in the ongoing battle against Amazon, which is schooling just about everyone in ecommerce.

But Deliv thinks that retailers already have what it takes to out-Amazon Amazon: their physical locations.

“Retailers’ inventory, by nature of where they put their stories, lies within five miles of consumer populations. Their inventory is already where it needs to be, ” Carmeli said.

It’s an interesting idea, considering that brick-and-mortar stores have been major liabilities for retailers over the past few years. Not only are people using their local Best Buys as showrooms for Amazon, but physical locations cost lots of money — especially in busy metropolitan areas. Deliv, then, is important because it allows retailers to harness the power of those stores, changing them from liabilities to hugely effective assets. Not even Amazon can do that right now.

For the Wal-Marts and Best Buys of the world, the cure for showrooming could just be the showrooms themselves.

Getting an edge on home-delivery is a continuous battle amongst e-commerce giants and brick-and-mortar retailers alike. Amazon, eBay, and Target, not to mention a slew of startups, are experimenting with different models that quickly and cheaply get their products into the hands of purchasers. Even Google today announced its own same-day shopping service called Shopping Express. 

Wal-Mart began testing a same-day delivery service during the holiday season in order to keep up with competitors and consumer demand. According to a report in Reuters, Wal-Mart’s latest plan would pay in-store customers to deliver online orders to people in their community. People who are shopping at an actual Wal-Mart can sign up to drop off packages for people who live nearby, and in exchange receive a discount on their shipping bill.

The plan is based on the idea of the “sharing economy,” which connects people with available goods, services, skills, space, time etc… to those who need them.  Startups like TaskRabbit, Exec, Zaarly, and Postmates have quickly made this model a staple of internet commerce, and large retailers are taking notice.

Wal-Mart has struggled to make in-roads with the online market. It traditionally uses Fedex for online purchases and recently began trying out a series of different delivery models to see what works. Earlier this week, the corporation announced plans to test the use of lockers to store online purchases until shoppers pick them up, similar to Amazon. It also recently experimented with deploying its own delivery trucks with Walmart To Go.

Leveraging a local workforce could provide more immediate service than channels like Fedex, UPS, or the postal service, at a lower cost than building up an internal fleet of delivery vans and drivers. However, working with regular people instead of employees raises a whole different slew of issues of accountability, reliability, and scale. The idea is currently in the “brain-storming” stage, according to Wal-Mart exec Jeff McAllister in the Reuters article. However, it will be available as a test in some stores, and perhaps only available for metro markets and higher-price items.

Photo Credit: NNECAPA/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s not just gadget geeks that are eager to see HTC back on top. Best Buy is the main retail partner for the newly announced HTC One, and it’s going to great lengths to make sure that the mobile phone is a success.

“The reason why we’re excited about this one is we need HTC back in the market,” said Best Buy head of marketing Allister Jones in an interview with VentureBeat this morning. “We need customers to have more than two choices when it actually comes to smartphones. So we’re excited not just about this phone from HTC but to see what else comes from HTC this year.

“It’s going to be an exciting year for smartphones.”

[Check out our hands-on with the new HTC One.]

The HTC One will be available on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint in late March.

Early on in the interview, Jones and I both recounted fond memories of last year’s HTC One S. That was one of the best Android phones I’ve ever used, but for some reason it never took off with consumers. Seemingly aware of that, Jones said that Best Buy is going to “talk to consumers in a slightly different way” and that it’s also partnering with HTC on a collaborative marketing effort.

“We haven’t done a lot of this with HTC, but we feel really confident that the plans we’re putting in place for the end of March and through April will be good for creating awareness for this device and awareness that Best Buy is probably the best place to buy it,” Jones said.

Marketing the HTC One will be just one of many ways Best Buy is going to focus more on mobile this year. Jones also hinted that we’ll see marketing efforts from Best Buy’s website directly lead consumers to the One S in stores. Best Buy will also be training its staff on the HTC One in addition to the other product training they normally receive.

The retailer is also considering ways to promote its in-store pickup option. (While Amazon and eBay are both dabbling in same-day shipping, Best Buy already has technically been doing that for years with in-store pickup.)

It seems difficult for Best Buy to focus so much on a single phone when it’s also benefiting from sales of competing devices. Jones admitted that this was a complicated situation, but he added that Best Buy is also focused on making sure consumers find the devices that best fit their customers.

“Our sales people aren’t incentivized to sell one product over another, but they are hugely enthusiastic about matching people with technology, it just has to be the right technology,” Jones said.