If you’ve ever worked on a home renovation project, this scenario will sound familiar: You get partway through the work only to discover you’ve run out of an essential material. Or you can’t find the correct socket size, even though you know it’s around here somewhere. Or water is spraying everywhere and you need a replacement right now.
Your contractor customers deal with these problems on an exponential scale. A hardware store run means lost time, lost project momentum and lost gas money. But when the store doesn’t offer same-day delivery, they have to suck it up and send someone.
Contractors need building material deliveries that are affordable and reliable. But with tight schedules and constantly changing plans, delivery logistics can often be a challenge. Adding to the complexity, unexpected job site conditions or circumstances may mean those customers need those materials or tools immediately.
If you’re a building materials distributor struggling to keep up with the demand for same-day delivery, crowdsourcing could be the answer you’re looking for.
Costs on the rise for home improvement contractors
Rising costs top the list of worries for contractors going into 2023. According to Michael Hardman from consultancy Turner & Townsend, prices will rise around 7% in 2023. Added to the cost increases from the last couple of years, 2024’s material prices will be 25-28% higher than they would have been under different conditions (like an untangled supply chain, for example).
But contractors don’t just have the cost of materials to worry about. Fuel prices may have taken a dip from their all-time high, but they’re still considerable — especially for diesel vehicles. And with construction workers earning an average of $19 per hour, the cost of sending laborers on materials runs when they could be performing on-site tasks adds up.
A delay at any stage of a job can snowball into bigger problems down the line. It’s just not feasible to wait on tools or materials, even for just a few days, because that can put the whole project at risk of missing its final deadline.
These challenges for contractors create opportunities for distributors. If you can make it convenient, easy and affordable to get the essential building materials and tools contractors need on the job site within a tight delivery window, they’ll come back again and again.
Same-day delivery challenges for building materials
Ultrafast delivery might be the only option from your customer’s point of view. Getting materials and tools delivered within hours saves them both time and money, and makes it easier to meet rigid deadlines.
The problem is that offering same-day delivery using your own trucks and drivers can become a major headache. You’ll have to take on added costs like fuel, vehicle maintenance and labor — and that last one can be particularly tricky amid the labor shortages we’ve seen in the past couple of years. If you’re already struggling to get things done with your existing team, hiring more drivers to handle same-day orders might not be feasible.
When offering your own same-day delivery service, creating efficient routes and reducing distance between fulfillment and delivery also creates problems. This is especially true if you have several retail or warehouse locations but no good way to ensure you’re sending from the closest location to your customers. Inefficient routing quickly translates to added costs, which can make deep cuts into the profitability you would otherwise see from adding same-day delivery.
Crowdsourcing solves your home improvement delivery challenges
Using crowdsourced delivery makes it easier to offer fast, convenient delivery options to your contractor customers. Independent drivers using their own vehicles can pick up and deliver within much tighter windows than a traditional carrier or courier, even for oversized or bulky orders. And because you don’t have to maintain a fleet or hire extra drivers, you can provide same-day delivery at a reasonable cost for your customers.
Crowdsourced delivery also lets you scale quickly to meet changes in demand. During the busy home improvement season, you can keep up with orders without hiring extra year-round employees. And since you’re not tying drivers or vehicles to a single fulfillment center, you can ship from whichever warehouse or retail location is closest to your customer.
That makes it much easier to get orders to customers within hours, which will give your customer loyalty a serious boost.
Roadie is your ideal crowdsourcing partner
The Roadie nationwide network of more than 200,000 independent delivery drivers helps you delight your home improvement customers, from DIYers to contractors. With on-demand crowdsourced delivery, you can offer local same-day and next-day delivery up to 100 miles from your facility within a few hours.
Our batched and routed delivery solutions optimize your fulfillment footprint to send orders from the best location, and give your customers plenty of ultrafast options, such as two-hour, same-day or next-day delivery.
Want to handle picking up returns or delivering big and bulky items? Crowdsourced drivers can take care of those for you, too — and without the extensive fees a carrier might charge. Add Roadie’s bulk uploading and real-time tracking features, and managing your ultrafast deliveries becomes as easy as a few clicks.
Want to get started with crowdsourced delivery and satisfy your contractor customers this home improvement season? Get in touch today.
