Concept of Delivery
Using a Delivery Service vs. Creating an in-House Delivery Team
If you already know that you want to start an in-house delivery team rather than using a third-party, skip ahead to our step-by-step process for setting up your own operation.
Depending on your industry, you might be weighing up two options. Either running your own delivery team, or using a delivery service.
When you hire a delivery service, the main pro is you don’t have to spend time hiring delivery drivers and planning and managing routes. Instead, you can focus on your business. While that’s good in theory, there are some significant caveats to consider.
- Third-party delivery services are expensive and cut deeply into your margins. The restaurant industry, specifically, is known for using popular food delivery apps such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Postmates. But these apps are expensive for the restaurant, to the point where businesses need to raise prices to just break even.
- When you hire a delivery service, you’re hiring a third-party to represent your company, which means you’re losing control over the customer experience. While your customer may have interacted with your business online or over the phone, it’s a third-party delivery driver who provides the last impression of how your company treats its customers. Sometimes this can go south quickly, like when couriers are caught mishandling packages.
But starting your own delivery business can seem daunting, especially if no one in your operation has any experience creating delivery schedules and managing drivers.
That’s where we come in.
Before we developed Circuit for Teams, we focused on helping individual drivers plan better routes (with a route planner app that’s still widely used by professional couriers). Based on our customers’ feedback, we realized businesses were looking to manage their own deliveries but struggled to find affordable, easy-to-use delivery tools.
By talking to our customers over the years, we’ve learned what your business needs to start (and perfect) its delivery service.
