We’re get-up-early, get-the-doorbuster, dedicated Black Friday shoppers in my family. Or, at least, we were. Now, my routine is a lot simpler: I pour a cup of coffee, find a leftover piece of pumpkin pie, and open my laptop. 

I’m not the only one. Anyone who works in the retail or logistics industry knows that e-commerce dominates Thanksgiving weekend now. While Black Friday store visits came back in 2022, the number of consumers shopping online (87.2 million) outpaced the 72.9 million people visiting stores, according to the National Retail Federation. Another 77 million people shopped online on Cyber Monday – 59% from a mobile device.  

But one thing hasn’t changed: Those digital shoppers still crave the instant gratification of taking their purchases home with them. 

The rise of same-day fulfillment has been all about getting customers closer to that get-it-now experience again — this time, with orders they placed from the couch. Retailers like Target and Amazon continuously work to build up their same-day fulfillment capacity, and the pressure is on for sellers of all sizes to follow suit.  

Retailers now have to offer a seamless e-commerce experience and enable shoppers to receive their orders the same day. It’s an entirely different challenge than they had to meet just a few years ago — and that’s while ensuring in-store experiences, which are still important, remain seamless, too. 

A Challenge and an Opportunity

The solution for many retailers is crowd-sourced delivery. Crowd-sourcing allows a retailer to tap into a network of independent drivers in personal vehicles to get those new purchases into consumers’ hands more quickly than traditional delivery options — further than a traditional courier would take it, with no need for additional fixed assets.  

Ultrafast delivery is rapidly becoming table stakes, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other advantages. Using a crowd-sourced platform opens up a lot of possibilities for increased convenience for the consumer — they can have much more control over their delivery experience. The customer can select a delivery time that works for them, use live tracking to monitor the driver’s progress and communicate directly with the driver if issues emerge. That helps ensure the brand-new 55-inch TV they snagged at the big Black Friday blowout sale safely reaches their doorstep when someone is there to collect it.  

Retailers get big benefits too. Because it’s highly flexible and scalable, crowd-sourced delivery is ideal for peak surges like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Drivers can pick up orders from stores, warehouses or any forward deployed inventory (FDI) location. Some crowd-sourced partners also offer order consolidation along a single route, which opens the door to substantial cost savings.

Businesses are taking note. The quick commerce market — defined as ultra-fast and extremely efficient delivery of online orders to customers — is growing at a 15.2% compound annual rate, according to Statista.  

How to Maximize the Benefits of Crowd-Sourced Delivery

If you’re incorporating crowd-sourcing into your Black Friday/Cyber Monday fulfillment plans (or you’re interested in exploring it), there are some steps you can take to maximize the benefits.

Nail down airtight fulfillment processes. As we all know, peak events put added stress on fulfillment operations. That’s especially true when order pickers will be sharing the aisles with holiday crowds in the store. Make sure you set aside enough space to stage digital orders so crowd-sourced drivers can easily connect with the right items. 

Thoughtfully-designed processes for picking, organizing and tendering orders are key to getting items on their way quickly, no matter where you’re fulfilling them from. Consider bringing sortation in-house — some third-party partners offer tools for in-house sortation that can help streamline warehouse fulfillment operations and reduce fulfillment times. 

Make sure you have enough pickers-and-packers. The right amount of seasonal labor is critical. Crowd-sourced delivery platforms tend to see a spike in engagement from drivers around the holidays as they look to pick up extra cash. Retailers must ensure they have enough additional labor on their side as well to get orders into these drivers’ hands quickly and accurately, without disrupting the in-store experience. 

Consider early savings events for bulky items. To maximize store floor space, consider launching promotions early for larger, bulky Black Friday items like electronics or furniture. Fulfilling those orders from stores or DCs before the event can free up more space for additional high-demand merchandise.  

Make sure you’re seeing correct inventory at all times. Modern inventory management tools enable you to see and sell inventory from across your entire store and DC network. Make use of automated replenishment and real-time alerts — if the last TV in the store is in a physical cart on its way to a checkout lane, you don’t want to sell it to an online shopper and risk disappointing them. 

Looking Beyond Black Friday               

Of course, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just the official beginning to the holiday shopping rush. The week leading into December 25 brings yet another surge, as shoppers make last-minute purchases to complete their holiday prep. 

At a time when brick-and-mortar retail stores are at their most chaotic, consider funneling some of that madness away from stores with crowd-sourced delivery. Crowd-sourcing gives last-minute shoppers and retailers alike some grace: Ultra-fast delivery means retailers can offer much later cutoff dates for goods to arrive by the holidays. 

Customers’ expectations for delivery are always moving toward freer and faster, and for retailers, it can feel like the goalposts are constantly moving. But with help from crowd-sourced delivery, you can meet that demand without trouble, put the customer in control of their delivery experience, and — yes — get your customers their orders while they’re considering eating the last slice of pumpkin pie.

Dennis Moon is chief operating officer of Roadie.