South African start-up WumDrop has launched a new service, initially exclusively in partnership with The Foschini Group, that will deliver online orders to you, wherever you happen to find yourself.
The new service, called Deliver 2 Me, is meant to get around the problem of having to stay in one location — often for an entire day — when expecting a delivery.
“You can’t leave, and you can’t call or track your delivery guy to find out where he is,” the company said. “When it comes down to it, every other delivery service is delivering to addresses on a map, not to people.”
Instead of delivering to an address, Deliver 2 Me promises to deliver to consumers, based on the location of their phone.
This, it said, means people can choose the hour they’d like their order delivered, and to the location they happen to be, regardless of whether that location has an address.
For now, Deliver 2 Me is available only through The Foschini Group’s online shopping site TFG eMall.
The service will be made available for integration to other retailers through WumDrop’s application programming interface.
WumDrop founder Simon Hartley described the platform as a “significant leap forward” in business-to-consumer delivery, particularly in Africa where address data can be “highly unreliable”.
“Deliver 2 Me isn’t locked into a native mobile app like most geolocation services. Rather, it leverages the increasingly powerful suite of features found in mobile browsers to deliver an accurate delivery location to the driver, and a clean, easy-to-use interface to the end user,” said WumDrop chief technology officer Wilson Canda.
Here’s how it works. When a consumer places an order and wants to use the delivery platform, they choose the Deliver 2 Me option. When their parcel is ready for delivery, they’ll receive an SMS with a link to the Deliver 2 Me mobile Web app.
They can choose either “deliver now” or “deliver later”. Choosing “deliver now” allows them to drop a pin or type in a specific location, while choosing “deliver later” allows them to choose another time or day when they’d prefer to receive the SMS to kick off the “deliver now” step.
Users can even change their location while a delivery is scheduled. This will lead to an automatic prompt to drop a pin at their new location. The driver will then re-route to the user’s new location.
WumDrop, which describes itself as a “last-mile delivery service for businesses and people”, is available in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria. — © 2017 NewsCentral Media
