A big challenge with online selling now is called the last mile problem.
It is easy to sell the product online, it can be delivered to an address at a cost, but is there a person at that address to accept it. This is needed as if I am sending a $500 item, I do not want to leave it on a door.
For this reason many deliveries, customer request to be sent to their work because there is no way to guarantee that someone will be at their home to accept it. Many people do not have this option, plus many people do not want people at work to know what they ordered, if its a present you often want to present it to them, not they pick it up and see what it is first and many workplaces will not do it.
As such many large retailers have set themselves up with Click and Collect so their customers can pick it up.
This option is not available to large online retailers and many SMB businesses, so what they use hubs. Currently, these hubs do about 30% of all online deliveries. So these hubs do bring many people. It is a lot of traffic and now this extra traffic it is going to IGA supermarkets, Priceline pharmacies and some shopping centres. So I was pleased to hear that Amazon is extending its hubs to many of my clients.
Knowing Amazon, I am sure their payments are not going to be much for providing this service, but the real question is just how good will be this extra foot traffic be for the shops that offer these hubs.
