Roadie Uses Crowdsourcing to Help Small Grocery Stores Create Home Delivery Services

Grocery delivery is a competitive business. However, Walmart, Amazon and Instacart aren’t the only players battling for a stake of this thriving market. Now there’s an alternative designed to help the smaller grocery store competing with the bigger names in the space. Small Business Trends spoke with Marc Gorlin, Founder and CEO of Roadie to find out more.

Roadie Delivery Service

He told us this self described “app-based community” was founded on two of the principles that make America great—innovation and hospitality.

“Roadie was founded on the southern notion of neighbors helping neighbors,” Gorlin said. “It’s a new crowdsourced delivery model that leverages existing resources.”

Great Business Ideas

Like a lot of other great business ideas, Gorlin saw a need and a way to fill it. When he needed some warehouse custom tile to complete a bathroom renovation, a notion for a great practical way to get them same day occurred to him.

Going Somewhere

“I started to think, there’s always someone going somewhere, surely someone who was already headed in that direction would be willing to transport a couple boxes of tile,” he said. “Roadie was created to unlock this massive, untapped resource to create convenient, inexpensive delivery solutions for consumers and businesses.”

The Right Direction

Those resources are in fact the unused spaces in vehicles from drivers already on the road—whether they be local commuters, customers or even employees en route from one store to another. In short, Roadie matches small businesses shipping things with drivers already going in the right direction.

Smaller retailers and grocery stores are challenged to meet client expectations of no cost same-day and next-day delivery. Roadie is a way to fight back against the low-cost shipping offerings of Instacart and Amazon by supplying  delivery with no contracts, daily, or mileage minimums.

There are some other big advantages to small businesses.

“The Roadie model empowers retailers to ramp up service in new markets almost instantly and to quickly scale up by adding employees, customers and other nearby drivers to the platform,” says Gorlin.

More Effective

Roadie’s on-the-way delivery model is more effective than on-demand since most of these courier-style delivery providers labor under higher fixed costs, smaller geographic areas they work in and package size restrictions.

This app that specializes in fragile and oversized deliveries has been making a dent too. According to data supplied by Gorlin, Roadie has already made deliveries to over 9,000 cities across the country.  There’s a dashboard where you can track deliveries in real time and provide customer notifications upon delivery.

There’s even employment opportunities available too.

Roadie has over 60,000 pre-qualified drivers covering all 50 states. Drivers can sign up and match up the deliveries they take on with their schedules. In that way, Roadie is flexible like Uber or Lyft for people looking to work for the company.

If you’re a small business looking to use Roadie, you can sign up here.

Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "Roadie Uses Crowdsourcing to Help Small Grocery Stores Create Home Delivery Services" was first published on Small Business Trends