Ecommerce to hyperlocal ecommerce- Tracking the customer’s journey from satisfaction to delight

“Ecommerce prompted sellers to just deliver to customers. Hyperlocal ecommerce has made them deliver instantly and promptly. And perhaps, this has made all the difference.”

Introduction

Not very long back, people, irrespective of the region and country they inhabited, had to travel places to buy and sell things, but ecommerce had other plans for them. It gave them a common platform in the form of internet, which provided them a fresh lease of life and approach, and asked them to make mutually beneficial exchanges and do business online.

With the coming into being of technology and increased internet penetration around the world, commerce saw itself going online pretty soon. From a time when people had to move out of their dwelling places and offices and reach out to physical brick and mortar stores for fulfilling their basic necessities, ecommerce changed the face of buying and selling forever.

Ecommerce, a result of massive trade liberalization practices and rampant growth in technology, paved way for the world to become popular as a global village. It was ecommerce from just a few decades back that made consumers’ lives easy and businesses’ life, a highly growth oriented one. Courtesy to continuing internet penetration, globalization and domination of technology over all the major aspects of a business, ecommerce found itself expanding from one territory to another in quick time.

From buying convenience goods to shopping goods and eventually specialty goods, ecommerce just couldn’t have evolved any faster than the way it has. Reminiscing the times when moving out and buying a convenience product was a tiring affair to this day when buying even the specialty goods mean no big deal for the contemporary customers, ecommerce has just about grown by leaps and bounds. It has a wide portfolio of products to sell, and an unfathomable number of customers all over the world to reach out to and relay those products into the customers’ hands so as to be eventually consumed by them.

In this fast-paced world of buying and selling, where taking a short break or procrastinating your moves, makes you lose a big chunk of market share, ecommerce just in time has relayed itself to a more advanced and refined form of buying and selling, which we today know as ‘hyperlocal ecommerce’. By doing so, it has tried making its customers delighted- a notch up than leaving them merely satisfied. But are they really delighted? Let us find out.

What is it?

Hyperlocal ecommerce, an extended and a progressive version of ecommerce, is nothing but ecommerce done extremely fast. By virtue of remaining closer to both the seller and the buyer, the hyperlocal ecommerce model is a quick one that enables and ensures lightning-fast deliveries to the doorsteps of the consumers. By sourcing products directly from the local vendors, hyperlocal delivery services efficiently reach the ultimate buyer. Hyperlocal ecommerce scores over and above the traditional ecommerce because of the simple fact that it delivers really fast to the customers that look for instant delivery options.

What’s the ingredient of hyperlocal ecommerce?

Precisely expressing, speed is the major ingredient that has made ecommerce turn hyperlocal. No doubt that it ensures easiness and convenience as that of traditional ecommerce, but it is its tremendous ability to deliver things with the speed of light that sets it apart. As consumers become increasingly demanding and ravenous about quick deliveries, speed deliveries are a potent weapon in the armory of hyperlocal businesses that keeps them mighty tall and upfront. For this, businesses of today are relying heavily on the incumbent and impending technologies- with the use of drones and robots being the foremost one. This again promises more speed and something which is sure to leave the satisfied customers with a sense of delight.

Besides this, options of real order tracking, geo location tagging and geo fencing can also serve as major ingredients that make up for one effective hyperlocal delivery.

Not to forget, behind the success of such speedy deliveries, lie at the backend a highly robust and efficient hyperlocal ecommerce delivery software, without which no hyperlocal delivery can ever be made.

When ecommerce transited to hyperlocal, the coming into being of a hyperlocal delivery software and apps was somewhere at the helm of affairs, thereby prompting businesses to adopt faster delivery models in their operations and leaving customers’ wanting for more instant deliveries. So, the importance of a futuristic and efficient hyperlocal ecommerce delivery software that is capable of providing highly customized hyperlocal ecommerce delivery solutions as a fundamental ingredient should not be ruled out.

What do the modern consumers expect from hyperlocal deliveries?

Along with the advent of technology and online commerce growing to unprecedented a degree, came along a set of high consumer expectations. This expectation was of speedy deliveries and real time order tracking of their orders, along with a few others that are successfully fulfilled by hyperlocal businesses of today.

Contemporary consumers have become rapacious about what they order online. Whatever little was left of them to demand from ecommerce was fulfilled by the outbreak of the pandemic three years back. With the modern consumers left with no options to move out, they had to rely on home delivery options, perhaps, which is where hyperlocal deliveries came barging into the big picture.

Knowing that consumers are quarantined with myriad needs to be fulfilled, hyperlocal businesses jumped in and came to the rescue of a major population of the world. Introducing features like safe, quick and contactless deliveries with order tracking in real time gave such businesses the required edge over the not so innovative and quick ones. Consumers any way had to buy, and hyperlocal ecommerce came as a solid answer to their buying hassles and needs.

According to a study by digital operations platform Brightpearl, one of the ‘pivotal’ shifts in spending habits of consumers since the outbreak of the pandemic, is a drift toward local shopping and a move away from malls, with 75% of consumers planning to shop more locally over the next years. As far as the pandemic’s impact over the food industry is concerned, at-home food consumption and meal-delivery apps like DoorDash witnessed a massive surge. Hence, startups to legacy brands have started to see the brighter side of it and are curiously looking for ways to monetize that demand with new at-home food service and delivery models that boost customer convenience and add a personalized twist to the dining experience.

Had it not been for the outbreak of the pandemic, it is highly likely that contemporary consumers would not have adopted and embraced the hyperlocal model the way they have. In fact, some of today’s profoundly known businesses such as Amazon, have begun providing hyperlocal delivery of vital goods around different countries to meet the most pressing needs of today’s customers. They have strikingly prioritized their order fulfillment and logistics capability to help reach high priority goods to customers as quickly as possible.

Wrapping up

Hyperlocal ecommerce has spoilt customers for choice. There is so much to choose from. They anyway are going to go for instant and contactless deliveries. If it is not from you, it may be from some other neighborhood business that just fulfills their needs speedily and conveniently. One thing which is certain is that consumers of today are craving for fast deliveries and if there is anything which can enable businesses to satisfy such cravings, it is the use of an efficient hyperlocal ecommerce delivery software that just does not exhaust. Because in a world of evolving consumer needs, there ought to be hyperlocal businesses which can keep their target customers delighted through their logistics and delivery by tirelessly working on it.

Now as the contemporary consumers have become accustomed to receiving their ordered goods and home essentials at the click of a button, hyperlocal businesses too, must pick up pace in improving their supply chain distribution and streamline logistical operations so that they are able to serve well to the ever-changing needs of the modern-day consumers. Any failure on the business’s part not to do so, can leave the customers highly dissatisfied and may be disenchanted, leave aside satisfaction and delight.